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Comment by liveoneggs | Hacker News Reader

Apps in app stores already have age ratings.

Websites could easily add X-Recommended-Age or X-Content-Rating headers where browsers could enforce a decent set of filters for adult-oriented content.

Popular platforms, I think, have age ratings on streams (twitch stream age tags), youtube, etc

The above would cover 90% of content-related concerns and combined with things like cloudflare dns filtering you'd have a relatively safe internet experience.

The interacting-whith-people (or oddball harms like character.ai) concerns can then be more easily policed by parents.

The industry has chosen not to implement basic controls and is asking for government controls.

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This honestly. I honestly think this is so easily solved at the OS/browser level. Apple already does parental controls. Just pass 'Can view adult content' and 'can watch ads' from there to the browser. Don't even expose the actual age.

I’ll just leave this here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Conten... and https://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Voluntary_Content_Rating

Like any other “voluntary” system, this is also doomed to fail. It’s not like the cigarette companies didn’t target children for a reason.

To put it bluntly, the companies that use the “voluntary” metric that by definition restrict their reach will have less monthly active users and therefore less revenue than those who do not, so therefore nobody will. Already happened in 1998, it will definitely happen again.

If google required the voluntary ratings headers to exist for search results, or even just hinted that they were an SEO-positive metric (like extending RICE to add D-emographic) or serving appropriate ad content this would be implemented word-wide by next week.

I'm not sure appealing to a walled garden is the right approach here? This is, of course, why there are no explicit pornographic apps on the Apple App Store. They've explicitly forbidden it (section 1.1.4 of the App Store Review Guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/).

You're basically trading one regulatory body for another. Perhaps Google makes the "right" decision now, but you disagree with their SEO metrics in the future? We are already beholden to undemocratic tech platforms for a lot of our life, why provide them even more power over our lives? I realize that sounds a little hyperbolic, but it's interesting to see that we are much more comfortable with a multinational corporation that doesn't even have a customer service department to make rules about the Internet rather than a democratically elected government.

Google doesn't publish statistics AFAIK about adult search terms, but evidence from several sources puts adult related search terms at around 10-15% of search volume. Given our metric-obsessed micro-optimization culture, if even a small proportion of those users decided to shift to DuckDuckGo or Bing because they suddenly couldn't search for porn on Google, that would have a material effect on their advertising and bottom line.

My proposal does not give google any extra power or extra user data or even implicit trust.

I did not propose any rules. I proposed a header.

Google already creates and re-creates "the internet" for the vast majority of people on the regular basis by messing with its algorithm, pre-empting search results with AI-spam, showing ads, etc.

My statement was an assertion that the power google holds over the internet at-large is enough to incentivize compliance with opt-in content ratings for huge amounts of the web.

I also said nothing about adult search terms. The point is that an adult website can mark itself as one intentionally (X-Cotent-Rating: Mature) and then when google gets a search from a child's computer those results are simply filtered out. they already do this but site owners have no way to tell the world their intended audience.

My point was that this was already done (the links I shared - w3c standard that addressed this exact problem) and it utterly failed. TBH with today's AI capabilities, it could be built in to the OS or browser - no header necessary. I'm surprised this doesn't exist already.

that contradicts your earlier gripe about "consolidation" etc

No, you rightfully point out that it takes someone in a “monopoly” or regulatory power to … coerce … compliance with said standard. Hence the comments about who we want to be in that position-

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