Deadline looms for EC Net contract bids

NEWS Today is the last day for visionaries to put their ideas for a safer Internet into practice. The EC is willing to pay £700,000 for a set of feasibility studies on all the various options for removing illegal content from the Web. But the deadline is tonight. Successful applicants will be asked to examine four specific solutions, based on the EC's Best Practice studies around Europe. "All the approaches have their own merits and defects," EC Information Officer, Garhard Heine, told Silicon.com. Telephone hotlines, such as the Internet Watch Foundation's hotline against child pornography in the UK, will be considered, as will self-rating content like the World Wide Web Consortium's Pics platform, which gets Web developers to rate their own content based on a standard vocabulary. Third-party filter software will also be evaluated, as will awareness campaigns such as those run by the UK National Council for Educational Technology. The EC's DG XIII will announce who is to conduct the full study in November. Winners in each category will have six months to draw up a proposal, after they have signed the contract. Heine stressed that the proposals will have to be approved by the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers before they are put into practice. "But both groups have already approved the first reading," he told Silicon.com, "and final confirmation is due by the end of next year." Heine said that if the proposals are approved, the EC will put out a second call for tenders - with more money available - to decide who would put them into practice. Applications for the first tender will be kept secret until they are opened on 5 October.