Box 2.6 The Platform for Internet Content Selection The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) is a framework for the support of content-rating systems. PICS provides standards that facilitate self-rating and third-party rating of content. Self-rating is performed by the content providers, who label the content they create and distribute. Third-party rating enables multiple, independent labeling services to associate additional labels with content created and distributed by others. Services may devise their own labeling systems, and the same content may receive different labels from different services. A content provider wishing to include a PICS-compliant label with its content first chooses a rating vocabulary to use, such as ICRA or RSAC-i. A provider will describe the content to be rated in terms of this vocabulary (usually generated by filling out an online questionnaire about that content). The output of that questionnaire is metadata with the appropriate, standardized, machine-readable descriptors, which is then placed into the metadata portion of a Web site. A third-party rater uses much the same process, except that the metadata is associated with the URL at which the content is found and placed into a database residing in a "label server." PICS is part of a larger effort being managed by the World Wide Web Consortium on metadata, that is, data associated with Web content that represents information about that content in a way that is easy for machines to deal with. Metadata is intended to facilitate searching, helping authors to describe their documents in ways that search engines, browsers, and Web crawlers can understand. SOURCE: See <http://www.w3.org/PICS>; Paul Resnick, 1997, "Filtering Information on the Internet," Scientific American, March; and Jim Miller and Paul Resnick, 1996, "PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship," Communications of the ACM 39(10): 87-93. For opposing views on the desirability of PICS, see Simson Garfinkel, "Good Clean PICS: The Most Effective Censorship Technology the Net Has Ever Seen May Already Be Installed on Your Desktop," <http://hotwired.lycos.com/packet/garfinkel/97/05/index2a.html>; Lawrence Lessig, 1997, "Tyranny in the Infrastructure," Wired 5.07(July), <http://www.wired.com/wired/5.07/cyber_rights.html>; and Jonathan Weinberg, 1997, "Rating the Net," Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 19(2): 453.