[bsdetector]

If the default wasn't "almost nothing" then you'd be sanctioning exposing some kids to content their parents didn't want them to see. If there's no economic incentive to tag content then it's not valuable content for kids.

Ultimately the problem is the provider knows what category the content is and the parent knows what the content policy is. Providers can't say whether it's "safe" or "unsafe", only what standards it complies with. Some parents will have weird policies like "only G-rated movies or any Jim Carey movie" that can't even be delegated in any reasonable way to providers.

So the header has "PG-13, US-legal" because it's a movie rated PG-13 and constitutionally-protected legal content in the US, and whatever other markets you want to open up. Providers could even include AI ratings so as to mass-tag their content at low cost, and parents can decide if a particular AI rating is okay.

Parental controls could even restrict official ratings to country of origin, so if you approve PG-13 it'll block that content from countries where you can't sue them for lying about it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If there's no economic incentive to tag content then it's not valuable content for kids.

Those two things are completely disjoint. In one case you're measuring the value of the content to the platform and in the other you're measuring the value of the content to the kids.

Suppose there is some content that the platform would get $10 in ad revenue to show to kids, would cost $100 to classify, and is worth $1000 to the kids.

In the land of spherical cows you could have the users pay the money, but that gets killed by transaction costs, privacy issues with payment systems, and that kids generally don't have money. So the kids lose access to valuable information because the platform isn't willing to spend $100 to make $10.

And it's still a problem even if the platform could make as much revenue from showing the content as the user receives value from it. Consider the entire firehose of social media posts on some unspecified site. Classifying it all would cost e.g. a billion dollars. So even if the value of kids having the content was half a billion dollars -- a huge sum equivalent to multiple human lifetimes of labor effort -- to the kids and the platform both, it's not happening because the cost of classifying the content is even larger yet.

> Ultimately the problem is the provider knows what category the content is

That's the problem though. The provider doesn't know what category the content is. There are Wikipedia pages that contain nudity etc. Who is going to pay someone to read the millions of articles and classify each one? But if they instead just mark the whole site as adult content, the amount of non-adult content kids lose access to is large.

[bsdetector]

The cost to the content provider can be reduced to zero by the parents, by allowing it in parental controls.

So the maximum cost to a provider is capped at convincing parents to disable blocking of the content. That could be an unfathomably large sum for pornhub or negligible for wikipedia.

The question then is what's cheaper, paying to have parents enable the content (for instance advertising to make that choice acceptable) or rating the content? If it's the former that's essentially the same value parents place on blocking that content.

You're looking at rating content in this default-block scheme as a cost, but really it's a discount. You're paying a smaller amount to rate the content "G - general audience" then convincing parents to allow unrated content.