ICRAdiary

Rate Speech - ICRA's latest Roundtable

ICRA held the latest in its series roundtable events at Time Warner's New York Headquarters. As with others in this highly successful series, the debate centred on the steps can we take to shield children from potentially objectionable content without repressing freedom of speech & expression. In particular, the role of private, self-regulation (labelling, rating, filtering, educating, etc) was discussed and debated in detail.

The event is summed up in the blog entry by the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Adam Thierer.

• Summary of Latest ICRA Summit on Internet Free Expression & Child Protection
• Biographical notes on Adam Thierer

New America Issue Brief on Policies and Technologies to Control Kids' Media Consumption

The New America Foundation hosted a policy roundtable at the Washington, D.C. offices of the Kaiser Family Foundation that discussed and debated "Policies and Technologies to Enhance Parental Control Over Children's Media Content."

U.S. Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mary Landrieu, along with FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Deborah Taylor Tate, led off the roundtable, followed by a discussion among an expert panel of 19 industry, academic and child advocacy experts including several ICRA board members.

The discussion progressed along a continuum of proposed solutions, beginning with traditional regulatory approaches, continuing with a look at technological solutions, including those that promise not only to block out bad media, but serve as guides for parents to identify good media, and concluding with an exploration of the emerging wireless, convergent, user-generated media world.

• New America Foundation Issue Brief summarizing the proceedings

W3C Issues first public draft for mobileOK

The W3C has followed up its publication of the Mobile Web Best Practices (see next diary entry) with the first public draft of its specification for mobileOK. This is to be a machine-readable trustmark that allows search engines, content aggregators and end users to recognise online resources that follow the Best Practices.

Importantly, it is very likely that the trustmark will be carried on the same technical platform used by ICRA for its content labels and its partners in the Quatro project. That platform is currently undergoing scrutiny in a separate group within W3C, the Content Label Incubator Group, which ICRA's Phil Archer chairs.

The aim is to create a solid commercial case for labelling resources for a variety of purposes, including child protection. The advent of mobileOK is an important step towards this.

• The first public draft of the mobileOK document
• Content Label Incubator Group
• Quatro project

W3C Issues Mobile Web Best Practices as Candidate Recommendation

ICRA has contributed to the work of a group of leading technology companies from around the world to reach an important milestone toward making it as easy to use the Web on a mobile device as on a desktop computer. W3C has published Mobile Web Best Practices a Candidate Recommendation, an indication of broad consensus on the technical content of the document.

• W3C Press release
• Testimonials from Mobile Web Best Practice Working Group members (including ICRA)
• Mobile Web Best Practices Candidate Recommendation

Fourth Roundtable event a success

ICRA's latest roundtable event, co-hosted by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, has been another success for the organization. "Mission Impossible? Protecting children and free expression in our new digital content world" attracted participants to Brussels from across Europe and beyond.

Viviane Reding, EU commissioner for information society and media, opened the event for which panellists and guests included Adam Thierer (PFF), Tim Suter (Ofcom), Michel Rotert (EuroISPA), Patricia Moll (Google), Camille de Stempel (AOL Europe) and Katinka Moonen (NICAM).

• Viviane Reding's opening remarks
• ZDNet UK report on the event: "Europe defends online broadcasting plans"
• Adam Thierer's blog posting about the event