Google Not Suitable for Children Under 12, Says Web Censor

UK Internet service provider Tibboh has just done something rather surprising: It's partnered with the British Board of Film Classification to, basically, age-proof the Internet.

It's for "safety" of course, but does Google really merit a "12" rating? The BBFC, like the MPAA, is responsible for those big, splashy age rating screens that pop up at the start of movies in the theater or on your DVDs at home. In the U.K. the ratings range from U, for universal, through PG for parental guidance (Bambi is a PG) and then films that are suitable for 12-, 15- and 18-year-olds and above. Now Tibboh has partnered with this independent body (the first time an ISP has done so) to age-rate the Internet. And yes, this is apparently technically possible--Tibboh says its servers have crawled around 3 billion Web pages so far and rated them according to the BBFC's classifications. This process is largely automatic, using a bunch of pre-existing services like Netsweeper, but the upshot is pretty simple: Families can pay for group access to the Net via Tibboh and then choose to limit the kind of services that their kids can access over the big, bad Interwolf. It's novel, it uses a familiar and, to a degree, "trusted" censorship brand, and it taps into the current social discomfort over the sort of content the Internet is delivering to your door, at ever higher speeds. But here's the thing: Tibboh's age-assessment algorithm mix has resulted in search engines like Google and Bing getting a "12" rating.