Every app submitted to the App or Play store already has to do this. If parental controls are on, then users cannot download those apps.

The only hard part for the web is that a site could lie since there is no gatekeeper, but some black lists can help with bad actors.

Do the app stores have per-country rules to decide a rating?

Maybe certain headers could be cryptographically signed. So like if your movie is rated PG by the MPA the MPA itself could sign a statement to that effect. Or a government could issue a social media company a license they could use to sign their pages as complying with some regulation and revoke their license if they don't comply.

Come up with a few categories and let the browser/OS decide.

Websites by default are ‘true’ for every category, unless they specify.

Categories are, for example of some: nudity, sexual, violence, etc.

It doesn’t have to be perfect but sites will have to err on the side of caution.

We could even create an html tag <restricted type=violence> for example, and the browser can simply not render that portion of the page of the user has that type disabled.

And we could give companies a pass for best-effort categorization using tech to assess user-generated content, along with allowing users to flag their own content as “safe”

A header is probably better than a tag.

The goal should be to satisfy most reasonable governments. A neutral technical standard and an international organization to maintain the the ontology for content descriptors

Ah I was proposing the tag as another option - maybe a news article is fine for kids but the comment section is unmoderated. That way they could still read the article but not the comments

Better idea is just tell the server if you want to hide restricted content. Then it can make any changes necessary. Yes it's a fingerprinting bit. Not a new one, because they could already detect whether the restricted tag was rendering or not, anyway.

But a HTML document could contain a listing of things, that might or might not fall in to these categorize (a search result). A better option would be to just have it as an attribute to elements, like the "lang=..." attribute. That way an UA could even have a policy of show text tagged, but not images. Or images only when clicked per images. Websites wouldn't need to implement spoilers or blurs then, this could be implemented in the UA.

The website operators in each region could look up what is the age of consent for the GeoIP browsing them. Here is one for parts of the world [2].

Or they could just add the header to anything that is potentially adult which is what I am proposing. It would be up to the parent to decide what is appropriate for their small children to view. Parents should already know what is legal for their kids to view.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_by_country

That's a sorry attempt at an excuse. Companies are expected to collect ID and have related business logic that respects local laws but can't figure out how to tag their content? That's an utterly nonsensical position.

There's no reason a simple, standardized header can't be used to communicate any number of classifications simultaneously.

Edit: It occurs to me that if you oppose all age related measures then my above response isn't entirely fair to you. I still think it's an absurd objection but the comparison I made no longer applies.

My point was they shouldn’t give an age rating, but instead a list of standardized content descriptors

Well fair enough. In that case we are actually in agreement. Let the end user (or network admin) sort out what is and isn't acceptable in a given context.

What we need regulation to provide (IMO) is a reliable way of doing that.

We don't need regulation, we need cooperation, analogous to movie ratings. A site could attest that they provide content ratings, and that attestation signed by an authority (MPAA). If they are found to have been dishonest about that, the signature is revoked (or probably easier, it's fairly short-lived and just won't be renewed). Browser makers (theatres) cooperate by only loading sites with a valid, signed attestation when the device's parental controls are enabled.

Sites can choose to have unrated content (adult movies) and those are only available on devices without an enabled parental control option (adult-only theaters).

But we already have that and it doesn't work. Sites don't bother to classify themselves. Whitelists are spotty and out of date. Almost nothing interoperates properly. My expectation given the scenario you describe is that business continues as usual with the vast majority of the internet thus being inaccessible when in "child" mode. As a result no one uses child mode and the vicious cycle perpetuates.

A solution would be browsers refusing to load any site that didn't provide such metadata, not just in child mode but in any mode. I suppose either Apple or Google would likely be capable of unilaterally imposing such a requirement as things currently stand. However I also think that's unlikely to happen on its own for various reasons. Thus legally mandating certain basic content classification categories in addition to an extensible standard protocol for communicating such metadata would (I expect) end the cycle. And rather than the government going after individuals the legislation could be structured to place the onus on mainstream browsers, OSes, and other client software to enforce compliance on their behalf.

> the vast majority of the internet thus being inaccessible when in "child" mode.

Fine. It probably should be, if sites don't want to bother cooperating.

But the expected result here is that parental controls continue not to work very well, parents continue not to use them (at least competently), and people continue complaining that something needs to be done. So I propose that we do something about that rather than sit around continuing to roll the dice on the next half assed turnkey authoritarian solution than an inept legislator fields courtesy of a lobbyist working for a megacorporation whose interests tread well into the realm of the blatantly evil.

We are seeking a solution to a social problem, not just a technical problem. If it fails to achieve most of the social goals, it won't be used and you get something worse. Welcome to the real world.

The standard OP is describing doesn't exist. So whether it "fails to achieve most of the social goals" is yet to be determined. Blocking unrated content seems like a pretty desirable feature to me. Why wouldn't that be one of the "social goals"?

You can turn on filtering and subscribe to a whitelist today. People don't seem to be satisfied with that solution. Why not? The answer to that question is what needs to be solved.

There's no web standard for labeling content, so "subscribe to a whitelist" today means crappy page or network-level content blocks implemented by a third party tool that has no understanding of the actual content on the page or application. That's not at all what's being proposed in this thread.

With a universal labeling standard the UX would be much better, and there'd be a much greater incentive for website owners to participate (they'd be implementing a universal standard, not adding support for one particular parental control tool).

It's a hard problem but the key is that it needs to be on the client rather than on the server, because that's what can have any information on jurisdictions, local regulations, religions, or general parental preference.

For example, it would be insane if every website and blog in the world to had to run logic to detect and prevent Elbonian males under 16 lunar years from seeing ankles except on Thursdays.