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A_.N O T E_.O N_.P I C S Law professor Larry Lessig, whose "PICS is the devil" became the battle cry of the Jacobins when he published the phrase in a Wired essay last year, argues that PICS's potential for abuse is particularly scary because of the potential for PICS-compliant browsers to make unrated content "disappear" from the user's experience. Now, no current implementation of PICS I know of does this, and I can't help thinking that if, say, Internet Explorer were to make PICS-based content blocking the default setting for Internet Explorer, the primary effect would be a second wind for Netscape and other browser manufacturers. Most people I know in the online world would never choose Internet Explorer's (currently hypothetical) default censorship when one could buy another browser whose defaults were set the other way. And Lessig admits that much of the force of his argument against PICS is diminished if PICS implementations do tell you what they censor, as they do today. (My Eudora Pro software, by the way, routinely informs me that certain people's messages have been routed to the Trash.) Note: I believe Lessig's point remains valid as to government-imposed server-level PICS-based filtering (rather than, say, browser-imposed user-level filtering), especially since no implementation of server-level PICS is likely to tell a user what has been blocked, much less enable her to sidestep the blocking. (I also concede that if Internet Explorer becomes the only browser, and if it sets PICS-based filtering as the default for Net browsing, all bets are off.) -- Mike Godwin Back to main story