Co-funded by the European UnionICRA (formerly the Internet Content Rating Association) has become part of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI). FOSI is an international non-profit organization of internet industry leaders working to develop a safer internet. Since 1994 ICRA supports the idea of self-regulation, leading to the best balance between the freedom of information on the internet and protecting children from potentially harmful material.
With the help descriptive vocabulary (“the ICRA questionnaire"), content providers determine the contents of their websites, thus generating a small file containing the labels to be linked to the content on one or more domains.
Users, especially parents of young children, can then use content filtering software to allow or disallow various types of content. One such application, ICRAplus, is maintained by ICRA itself. ICRA also has a validator which tests all versions of ICRA and old RSACi labels. ICRA makes no value judgement about sites.
Most of the items in the questionnaire allow the content provider to declare simply that a particular type of content is present or absent. The subjective decision about whether to allow access to that content is then made by the parent.
ICRA website: http://www.icra.org
