There is already a set of standards for this: websites can send content ratings to the browser, and the browser can choose not to show content on the basis of those ratings.
We don't need another one, especially one that inverts the polarity by having the browser proactively send information to the site.
Maybe that would work too, but “this device has a child lock turned on” seems like reasonable information to send? It’s a lot better than having to check ID’s.
Ok but I bet that's easy enough to classify the receiving browser behavior when it gets some rating value from the webserver and it cannot show certain content to user because parental control (i.e. it's not going to do more requests from the same browser fingerprint)
PICS and its successor (Powder) both appear to be abandoned. “Voluntary content rating” and “Rta marker” must be pretty obscure since I’m not finding a good web page.
I think these would be better thought of as attempts to create a web standard rather than an actual web standard?
I did a bit of research. Looks like the <meta name="rating"> tag is supported by Google's Safe Search. Most adults probably do Google searches with "safe search" turned on (since we don't want porn sites most of the time) and this will put website owners in a dilemma. What if it's not for kids but you don't want to drop out of Google search results? That's going to discourage usage of this tag by anything other than porn sites.
I asked ChatGPT about browser support for the meta tag. It appears to be an experimental feature in Firefox 146 that's turned off by default [1].
So, there's some work on this feature, but it seems like another signal is needed to say "It's not porn but I don't want my website to be visible on devices that have parental controls on," which would be needed for it to get mainstream usage.
Also, often you won't want to drop out, but just redirect kids to more appropriate content. For example, Lego's website has a popup to redirect kids to the "play zone." It might be nice to do that automatically, but the <meta name="rating"> tag isn't going to do the trick.
It's not a lack of imagination. I can easily imagine why people would believe otherwise. They're still wrong, even if I can easily imagine how they came to believe that.
But mostly, governments are trying to pass such laws because they want control, and kids are just a convenient excuse.
We don't need another one, especially one that inverts the polarity by having the browser proactively send information to the site.