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Has the FCC ever overstepped its authority? Four TV networks think so, according to this article in the LA Times.

Here is an excerpt:
“’The FCC overstepped its authority in an attempt to regulate content protected by the 1st Amendment, acted arbitrarily and failed to provide broadcasters with a clear and consistent standard for determining what content the government intends to penalize,’ the statement said.”

If a broadcaster is going to risk a fine from the FCC for indecency, it seems reasonable that a clear definition of “indecency” would be the minimum that they should require the FCC to provide. Apparently, there is some question as to whether the FCC is totally clear on this point.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of indecency or how you define it, you should at least be in favor of defending the 1st amendment, which, in James Madison’s 45 words, is a framework for personal freedom and the cornerstone of our definition of a free society.

I believe that it is the duty of such a free society, if it is to call itself free, to test and verify the boundaries of its government’s authority over society as defined by the rules by which we all agree to be governed.

As it relates to the wireless industry, my opinion is that we look more like the cable industry. Network operators in this country are operating subscriber-based private networks, not public airwaves, and this should delimit the authority of the FCC in this area. I therefore favor self-regulation in this area.

And so I was just reading with interest the Cingular Wireless Parental Control Guidelines, generally based on the CTIA standards, which they sent to all their developers and partners. I think this is good, and I am happy to see the CTIA and individual carriers like Cingular proactively address the issue of indecency so that parents can make informed decisions about the content to which they decide to expose their children.

But there is a trickle-down effect that concerns me: If there is the least bit of ambiguity in how the FCC defines “indecency” at the top of the pyramid, a great many entities at the middle and bottom of the pyramid will be greatly impacted. Further, I question the ability of the FCC to legislate decency when the very notion of it has wide margins of grey at its edges. To illustrate:

Do you know what “skeet” means?

The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language 4th Edition says it is a noun: “A form of trapshooting in which clay targets are thrown from traps to simulate birds in flight and are shot at from different stations.”

www.urbandictionary.com has a very different definition popularized by urban culture. So is this a “bad” word?

Apparently context makes all the difference. “Skeet” isn’t on any of the restricted word lists that I have seen.

There are other instances where context makes the difference between an acceptable use of a word and Tipper Gore putting a sticker on it:

You can “Prick your finger,” but not the other way around. You can also put your finger in a dike, or cock your gun.

Even adding a non-offensive word to a non-offensive sentence can be problematic:

If you say “Dick Cheney shot my face,” that’s ok.
If you say “Dick Cheney shot on my face,” that’s not ok. (Unless you’re into that sort of thing.)

None of the words in these sentences are offensive and the preceding sentence would make it through any automated filtering mechanism. Typically a “stop word” list will contain the George Carlin dirty words that we all know plus a good number of (sometimes humorous) derivitives. That is all fine and good.

But how do you apply a universal rule of decency to all content and implement controls to ensure adherence to the rule?

Let me say now that I am personally in favor of parental controls. As a media populist, I believe that all content should be readily available to anyone who wants to consume it. Adding clearly presented information about the nature of the content so that the consumer can decide whether he or she wants to consume it is a fine way to inform consumers to help them make decisions.

I believe every parent should have the ability to express their parenting preferences through the choices they make regarding the media that their children consume. Some parents may feel confident that their children are mature enough to make appropriate choices on their own. Others may feel that a more active role in what their children consume is more appropriate. In any case, the key is information. Parents can benefit from standardized information about content because it means the most paranoid among us do not have to see every movie, listen to every song and watch every TV show before our children do in order to determine whether they can watch it or not based on our own “parental sense” of what is acceptable.

If all content can be put into buckets and a user can filter access to a particular bucket of content (say, R-rated content) by setting a preference on the TV, radio, computer or their mobile phone, then 99% of the cases of offensive content will be addressed.

Here is a big problem:
There is no uniformly standardized information about content.

Let us take, for example, one of my favorite subjects of ratings history: A Clockwork Orange.

Did you know that the ground-breaking 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange was rated X?

X?? Isn’t that rating reserved for hardcore porn? Sort of. The rating “X” essentially got co-opted by the adult film industry and became synonymous with that genre. It was not a rating copyrighted by the MPAA, and so the MPAA later created the copyrighted “NC-17” rating to replace it.

A Clockwork Orange, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, was rated X.
Compare to Beach Blanket Bingo. (Which I have never seen.) Do these films belong in the same rating category? Some might argue yes, some no. Mine is not to argue either way, but just to question whether the categories in any rating system are descriptive enough. Let’s examine…

The current MPAA rating system maintains the following copyrighted ratings:
G
PG
PG-13
R
NC-17

Interestingly, A Clockwork Orange has also been rated C, O and R. The United States Catholic Conference’s Office for Film and Broadcasting maintained a rating system at the time that included a “C” rating, for “Condemned,” as in “no Catholic may see this.” The “C” rating was later dropped and replaced after 1982 with the “O” rating for “Morally Objectionable.” Kubrick cut 30 seconds from the film to receive an “R” rating from the MPAA in 1973.

The United States Catholic Conference’s Office for Film and Broadcasting maintains the following ratings:
A-I
A-II
A-III
L
O

Some other churches have rating systems of their own, but I didn’t take the time to search for them.

If there were a game based on A Clockwork Orange, it would likely receive an ESRB rating of “AO” meaning “Adults Only” for “prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.” (Not to mention Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content and Use of Drugs, if that’s what they were selling at the Korova Milk Bar.)

The ESRB currently maintains the following ratings:
EC
E
E10+
T
M
AO
RP

If A Clockwork Orange were a coin-operated video game, it would contain a parental advisory on a red sticker, because all coin operated video games now have Parental Advisory Disclosure Messages on a sticker in the following colors, apparently indicating the level of alarm a parent should feel:
Red
Yellow
Green

If they showed A Clockwork Orange on television, it would likely receive the rating of TV-MA, for Mature Audiences only. Here are the copyrighted television ratings:

TV-Y
TV-Y7-FV
TV-G
TV-PG
TV-14
TV-MA

(Since 2000, all televisions of 13” screens or larger contain a V-Chip that enables viewers to filter content based on these ratings.)

The soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange would not receive a Parental Advisory sticker on it, but the RIAA maintains its own rating system indicating whether song lyrics are “Explicit” or not.

I like the CTIA’s simple approach
The CTIA’s content rating system is easy to understand:
Cellular Accessible
Cellular Restricted

On top of this, individual carriers will probably promote their own marketing-ready interpretations of these guidelines. Cingular is very proactive in this area. It looks like Cingular may go with “Cingular Safe,” which is their working name at this point. I personally like it, as I think it sends the right message to parents. They want to know if content is “Safe” for their children or not.

The CTIA guidelines essentially put all repurposed content that already has a rating into each of the two buckets. So, PG content would go into the “Accessible” bucket, and R content would go into the “Restricted” bucket. This is simple and effective. Good. Good good good for all content that already exists, has already been rated elsewhere and only needs to be mapped to the additional rating system. But what about all the content that gets created and distributed via mobile devices every minute of every day?

Here, finally, is my point:
How do we effectively implement a rating system on communication?

Mobile “communication” is no longer defined simply as a station-to-station voice call. Communication in general is now comprised of text, photos, audio and video, and it is not limited to interaction between two people. You can take a picture with your camera phone and post it on your blog for a million people to see.

And what about the example of A Clockwork Orange mobisodes? There are clips of that movie that are completely inoffensive. Should every 1-minute slice of that movie, if that is how it is going to be distributed in the mobile connected future, be given the same rating? Who is going to watch every movie, minute by minute and assign a rating for each piece of content?

Of course there are review tools that can be deployed, and we built such a tool for Rabble. This picture with the caption “Man with big cock” showed up in our content monitoring tool recently because we flag the word “cock” with no relevance given to context.

(It’s ok to click – it’s not what you are thinking.)

An automated tool is only so effective because it cannot determine context. So we add human review to enforce our content policies. So far it works very well. But is this the right way to handle the regulation of all user-generated content in the future?

There is no way a centralized reviewing entity can effectively address all user-generated content in the world because content production is distributed. By comparison, it is easy to administer ratings for whole movies for traditional distribution – they only have to look at maybe 1000 pieces of content per year. Most blogging and social networking sites generate that much content in one minute.

There is a massive vacuum for an effective rating system for user-generated content. The answer is a distributed rating mechanism. I know of one company that has a very elegant solution about to be rolled out: User-generated ratings. You self-rate your content. If you lie about the rating, your standing as a good citizen gets affected negatively. The community, along with objective moderators, determine rating validity by voting on it. The majority rules. Prolific and truthful raters elevate their standing. Then every consumer of content has filtering tools that allow them only to see the level of content to which they want to be exposed. This can happen on the individual content level, the channel level, user level or categorically. The rating system contains buckets that map similarly enough to the MPAA or ESRB that it is easy for all to understand.

Our next platform release has a ratings widget for just such a purpose. It can be repurposed and/or combined for a variety of uses. At one end of the spectrum, there is the frivolous but fun “hot or not” type of rating. At the other end is content filtering that can then map to a rating standard for content filtering.

I know it seems simple, and I know some companies like Amazon.com and eBay have been doing a version of community-based rating and review for years in different contexts, but in the user-generated content space, we are about to see an explosion of activity in this area.

The FCC performs a valuable function by establishing a generally acceptable standard of decency. While the FCC can also make some guesses as to the specific definitions of decency at the blurry edges of content and communication, proactive companies will likely help the effort along by evolving content standards and practices along with the changing production and distribution mechanisms. Look for this to be one of the hottest topics in this space through the rest of the year.