The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) is an international, non-profit organization of internet leaders working to develop a safer internet. ICRA has long believed that self-regulation leads to the best balance between the free flow of digital content and protecting children from potentially harmful material. The centrepiece of the organization is the descriptive vocabulary, often referred to as "the ICRA questionnaire." Content providers check which of the elements in the questionnaire are present or absent from their websites. This then generates a small file containing the labels that is then linked to the content on one or more domains.
Users, especially parents of young children, can then use filtering software to allow or disallow access to web sites based on the information declared in the label. A key point is that the Internet Content Rating Association does not rate internet content - the content providers do that, using the ICRA labeling system. The descriptive vocabulary was drawn up by an international panel and designed to be as neutral and objective as possible. Most of the items in the questionnaire allow the content provider to declare simply that a particular type of content is present or absent. The subjective decision about whether to allow access to that content is then made by the parent. ICRA labels are expressed using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. Specifically, ICRA was instrumental in defining and now uses RDF Content Labels, a generic platform designed to support digital labels and trustmarks of all kinds.