Yesterday Microsoft announced that it was hooking up with the Internet Content Ratings Association to provide a FrontPage extension which helps people building a website include an ICRA rating. The aim is to help parents control what kind of sites their children visit.
This is all well and good, but I'd venture that the problem isn't to with parents who want to protect their children. It's about those children who given free licence to roam the web because parents remain woefully uneducated about the web. It's about making sure that those uninformed parents become informed - and not just through tabloid scare campaigns.
And it's also about making the giants of the web do more than just gesturing toward child protection - for a start they could make a real effort to cut the huge levels of pornographic spam dropping into webmail boxes every day.
