Campaign Will Urge Tags for Net Content

Backed by some of the Internet’s biggest names, a trade group is preparing a campaign to encourage millions of Web sites to use voluntary electronic tags so parents can screen their children’s computer use.

America Online, Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and Yahoo Inc. have agreed to use the tags on their online content and will begin asking those who use the portals to do the same, said Mary Lou Kenny, North American director of the Internet Content Rating Assn.

The campaign will be formally announced next week.

Support for the voluntary tags--which labels content according to categories such as adult, language, violence and hate--is significant because the three companies carry more than half of the Internet’s traffic, Kenny said.

About 200,000 sites currently use the tags, Kenny said. The ICRA will release a screening program next spring.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer already screens tagged sites, and critics of seamy Internet content say that the tagging effort has been a failure.

“To date, you can count those numbers of [tagged] sites in the hundreds, when there are millions that should be rated,” said Marc Kanter, vice president of marketing for Cybersitter, a screening program that doesn’t rely on tagging.

Kenny acknowledged that technology doesn’t yet allow for the tagging of content in club and community sections of the online services.

Yahoo and MSN have received criticism for allowing explicit sexual material in these sections, which are easily accessible to children.

The ICRA is working on developing a program that would affix tags to such sections, Kenny said.