The cable industry has a long-standing commitment to help parents manage media coming into their homes and to ensure its appropriateness for their children.  As a leading provider of high-speed Internet services, the cable industry shares the concerns of parents about keeping their children safe when online. The industry is committed fully to giving parents a wide range of tools, information and resources to help better shape and manage their family’s online use.

PointSmart.ClickSafe. Online Safety Initiative

In June 2008, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) – whose members collectively serve more than 90 percent of the nation’s cable television households – and Cable in the Classroom (CIC), the cable industry’s education foundation, launched Cable Puts You in Control: PointSmart.ClickSafe. (www.PointSmartClickSafe.org), a comprehensive initiative to educate consumers and parents about online safety and the appropriate use of the Internet by children. 

A key component of the PointSmart.ClickSafe initiative is the NCTA members’ pledge to:

Offer parental controls or filters free of charge to help families manage online content;

Offer various educational resources for parents, children, and other consumers about online parental controls and Internet-related media literacy;

Participate through Cable in the Classroom in partnerships with school-based and community-based education groups to ensure that information on Internet safety and literacy is available to teachers, parents and caregivers, and

In conformity with all legal requirements, cooperate with law enforcement officials to help prevent, police, and prosecute potential criminal activity online.

In June 2008, NCTA, CIC, the iKeepSafe and Common Sense Media hosted a major summit in Washington, DC.  For the first time, a broad cross-section of online safety stakeholders – including leading child safety advocates, parents groups, Internet service providers, online content providers, software companies, educators, law enforcement officials, and federal policymakers – convened to discuss best practices for online safety. 

Building on the summit, NCTA, CIC, iKeepSafe and Common Sense Media established a blue ribbon inter-industry commission.  The commission is currently working to further discuss, synthesize and develop best practices for online safety and literacy. 

NCTA-NCMEC Memorandum of Understanding

In July 2008, under an unprecedented industry-wide agreement, all cable operators represented on NCTA’s Board of Directors agreed to help reduce the proliferation of child pornography by signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).  Specifically, cable companies agreed to use NCMEC’s database of websites identified as containing child pornography to ensure that no such site is hosted on servers owned or controlled by those companies.  If cable companies learn that such sites are stored on their servers, they will remove them and provide information about the sites to NCMEC’s CyberTipline. Cable companies also agreed to review their policies around other potential sources of child pornography, such as newsgroups hosted by their systems, to deter such activity.