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Overview[]

The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) was part of the Family Online Safety Institute, an international, non-profit organization of internet leaders working to develop a safer internet. It was formed to design and implement an internationally-acceptable rating and filtering system for Internet content.

The centerpiece of the organization was the descriptive vocabulary, often referred to as "the ICRA questionnaire." Content providers checked which of the elements in the questionnaire were present or absent from their websites. This then generated a small file containing the labels that were then linked to the content on one or more domains.

Users, especially parents of young children, could then use filtering software to allow or disallow access to websites based on the information declared in the label. A key point was that ICRA did not rate internet content — the content providers did that, using the ICRA labeling system. ICRA made no value judgement about sites.

Upon a decision of the Family Online Safety Institute's Board of Directors, the ICRA labeling engine has been discontinued.