Yes, this is a popular approach. To me the intractable part is we still rely on either - A: content creators to properly/genuinely tag their content - B: a c

Yes, this is a popular approach. To me the intractable part is we still rely on either - A: content creators to properly/genuinely tag their content - B: a central entity to tag each content To clear the simple case, the B route is basically akin to the white listing efforts we have now, and going PICS or not doesn't look to me bring much to the table. If anything, PICS needs more management on the individual side than the current MDM approach where for instance, the school admins have a whitelist of sites available from within the school network. Going the A route, we still hit every moderation issue ever met by a user generated content system has. The question becomes, is the PICS system better than a bespoke filtering system ? I'm not sure, because: Depending on the site I'll probably want different options (I might want exceptions to the "no sex" filtering on medical discussion sites for instance). The site would be offering very tailored and specific options that would be set to reasonable values by default; site specific apparently could be implemented in PICS, but then I'd have to manage them in the PICS options of my browser, and I might have no idea what half of them even mean, when the site would have in context information on exactly what these options do. As funny as it is, having the filtering options bound to accounts instead of the browser could yield better results. I could have "personas" depending on what I intend to look for, which would be a pain with browsers (especially site by site). All in all, I have the feeling it's complicated either way, and PICS trying to be clever and simple brings different pitfalls by being the intermediary.