ICRA -The Internet Content Rating Association

The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) is an independent, non-profit organization established in the Spring of 1999. In 2000 they launched their current rating system. It is more detailed then the RSACi system was and allows for more flexibility in labeling a web site.

The ICRA Rating System depends on webmasters filling out a questionnaire. The questionnaire asked specific questions about the page content found within the webmaster's site. The questionnaire would be submitted to the ICRA web server which would respond with the appropriate HTML content advisory tags.

An Internet browser configured to read the ICRA Rating System can recognize these tags. Web pages would be displayed if they met the criteria selected by the user (parent, school, etc.). 

The Content Advisor in Microsoft's Internet Explorer supports the ICRA system by using a icra.rat file. The rat (RATing) file contains the rating system information that the browser can use to compare against the HTML content tags found on a rated web page. By default the browser looks for the rating files in the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder. If your system doesn't have the file you can download the icra.rat file from the ICRA web site. You need to save it to your WINDOWS\SYSTEM subdirectory.

ICRA has very detailed directions for installing their rat file in Internet Explorer's Content Advisor. 

Browse the Web with Content Advisor is Microsoft's How-to directions for activating the Internet Explorer 6 content advisor.

ICRA has also developed a filter (ICRAfilter) that they freely distribute.

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