Hosted by FOSI, the Family Online Safety Institute, the conference and exhibition is being billed as a venue for the national and international Internet industry to identify and promote best practices, tools and methods of online safety.
"I wanted to inform and update people about the industry's effort to protect children by their support of the Restricted to Adults (RTA) website label/meta-data tag," ASACP Executive Director Joan Irvine told XBIZ. "If ASACP is not there to tell this story, who will be?"
According to the FOSI website, the annual gathering is devoted to the burgeoning field of online safety, and will gather together the very best thinkers, the most innovative technologies, the most effective educators and the most enlightened legislators from around the world for a conference, exhibition and evening reception.
The event will feature hands-on displays of some of the leading technologies, filtering tools, ISPs and safe search engines together with some of the best online safety education tools and messages.
The purpose of the event is "to raise awareness of the extraordinary challenges facing parents, teachers, industry leaders, legislators and the kids themselves of our new digital world, while highlighting a range of evolving solutions."
"In D.C. when we talk about the industry adoption of the Restricted to Adults [tag], people are amazed and very impressed," Irvine said. "We have a great story to tell. There have been a major increase in websites labeling with RTA since Stormy Daniels started supporting it; the highlights of the video on YouTube have been viewed over 30,000 times."
According to Irvine, there currently are well over 3 million inbound links to the RTA website RTAlabel.org. "We have surveyed a number of larger companies that have labeled with RTA," Irvine said. "Based on their input, we can state that there are at least 40-50 million hits daily to pages that are labeled with RTA."
"This is a great example of the industry working together to protect children and it reflects well on the industry. ASACP wishes to thank its sponsors for their support which allows ASACP to work on such projects," Irvine concluded.
Founded in 1996, the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection is a nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating child pornography from the Internet. ASACP also works to help parents prevent children from viewing age-inappropriate material online.
