Earthlink announced Tuesday it will offer subscribers a kid-safe browser that blocks offensive content and allows parents to control their children's surfing habits.
The ISP is partnering with SurfMonkey, an Internet technology company based in Campbell, California.
Although the leading ISP, America Online, has long used filtering software to market itself to its 30 million subscribers, Earthlink has kept itself out of the filtering debate by appealing to Web-savvy surfers who don't need to be coddled.
An Earthlink spokesman said the company had been mulling for more than a year whether to offer the service to its 4.8 million subscribers, as porn sites and spam continue to proliferate and clutter the Web.
"I think any parent who's Internet-savvy knows there's a lot of opportunities on the Internet for kids to go into the wrong areas," said Arley Baker. "A good solution is to keep kids on the right track."
The basic filtering service is free to subscribers. Additionally, Earthlink offers a premium service for $2.95 a month that gives parents greater control over their children's Internet tracks and lets children access specialized e-mail and chat rooms.
SurfMonkey's strategy relies on a white list of 15,000 approved sites that are handpicked by the company's editors, said spokeswoman Cynthia Money.
Off limits are sites that feature content deemed inappropriate for kids, including information about drugs and alcohol, gambling, hate speech and sex, as well as unmonitored chat or discussion groups, she said.
Sites that have educational value but may be disturbing to children, such as Holocaust-related material, are judged on an individual basis.
A test of the browser found that patently naughty words are blocked from the search engine, but so was "breast cancer."
The technology also filters content within websites: Wired News was accessible via the browser, but the headline for a story about a debate in the Supreme Court over depictions of sex between minors in movies was changed from "High Court Tackles Kid Porn" to "High Court Tackles Kid ****." The story itself was blocked.
Free speech advocates say that the very criteria used by filtering companies such as SurfMonkey should be examined.
"There's very little debate about the underlying assumption that four-letter words and photographs of breasts are harmful," said Bennett Haselton, founder of Peacefire, an anti-censorship organization that publishes tools to override blocking software. "No one really questions the basic assumptions."
