The Internet Content Rating Association

The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) forms a major operating segment of the Family Online Safety Institute which is an international charitable organisation dedicated to making the internet a safer place for children, families and the community at large. ICRA was established in 1984 before the internet revolution really started and has been involved in establishing standards of good practice throughout the life of the internet in the hands of the public at large.

ICRA is heavily committed to self-regulation of the internet by the various stakeholders involved and believes that this is the best way to ensuring that an equilibrium is established which allows for the dissemination of internet based material while ensuring that children are protected from harmful and potentially harmful information and content.

Whilst not directly focused on gambling (or any other specific discipline for that matter), it covers a variety of issues related to online safety that concerns all industries like gambling.

The ICRA Questionnaire forms the mainstay of the services delivered by the organisation; the ICRA Questionnaire is based around an established "vocabulary" which allows operators to check their content and rate it against standards that have become established through experience and professional judgment. As a consequence of running the ICRA Questionnaire against a website, the operators are able to generate tags which can be linked to the website content and is then accessed by filtering software to empower parents when it comes to controlling access to the web and its content by their children.

The ICRA approach is to simply have a website operator declare whether certain content is present or not; content that is usually referred to as the ICRA Vocabulary includes:

• Whether nudity is included or not on the web site;
• Sexual content;
• Violence;
• Foul language;
• Whether user generated content is allowed and if so, whether it is moderated; and
• Potentially harmful content such as gambling, drugs or alcohol related subject matter.

There is a drill-down questionnaire which goes into greater detail where the web site operator has indicated that here is content of the nature the ICRA Questionnaire is looking to identify.

Note that the ICRA approach makes no judgment on the content whatsoever; the decision as to whether children should be allowed access or not to content rests with the parents who can use the tags generated to set parental control filtering software so that certain types of content are simply disallowed to their children. In this regard, ICRA is a misnomer as it is not in fact providing a rating of web content at all but rather categorizing it so that action can be taken as parents deem appropriate.

A practical example is with online gambling: a parent may decide that no gaming site should be allowed and therefore set the parental control filtering software to ban any and all gaming sites however, this is likely to exclude every site that allows online games to be played too. ICRA analysis will determine whether a web site is offering gambling facilities or operates on a condition of players not being minors; in this case ICRA will be able to generate the tags which will ensure that it is only these sites which are excluded and rendered inaccessible to children. In this we can see that ICRA delivers a valuable service not only to parents but to the operators of web sites whose services are by law, not to be provided to minors - if a web site prohibition against minors is to be enforced practically, it helps if children can be blocked at source from entering a gambling site in the very first instance.