Furthermore, even those families who live in well-served regions, have a very hard time making informed choices among the available products. Though some media outlets are beginning to provide reviews and evaluations of different services, there is little information available to enable a parent to chose which service best fits their own values. Some content control tools proposed to address objectionable content on the Web depend on actions taken by the authors or online publishers themselves. A variety of proposals have been offered to enable or require online publishers to label or otherwise identify the material that they put on the Web so that it can be blocked by users. The leading plan in this area that came closest to success was the RSACi system.
Several factors seems to account for the failure of publisher-controlled content restrictions.
The rating vocabularies have been the source of some controversy and are, in some cases, difficult to apply. Journalists and publishers of news, for example, have balked at rating their sites, as the ratings may have the effect of discouraging users from accessing material that, though controversial and graphic, is thought to have serious value. Most of the authors of the hundreds of millions of Web pages that now make up the public Web have not attached any content labels to their sites and have no clear reason to do so. Without some legal or market pressure forcing pages to be rated, publisher-controlled label systems are not likely to be effective. In addition to the main tools with which we are all familiar, a new hybrid of user and publisher controlled techniques are now being developed.