NetSTAR

TOKYO April 20, 2010

　TOKYO—April 20, 2010—NetSTAR, Inc., Yahoo Japan Corporation, and Digital Arts Inc., today announced the establishment of the Parental Filtering Study Group, an Study Group jointly formed by the three companies to research the current state of home-use filtering services and review issues of concern, provide information to parents and guardians, and compile a set of guidelines for filtering service providers. The Study Group will be chaired by Hirotsugu Shimoda, director of the Association of Media Study, and the members will included parents and guardians as well as experts in the fields of sociology, psychology, and educational engineering. The Study Group plans to release a report in November of this year.

　Japan saw the enactment of the Internet Control Law in April 2009, which required the implementation of filtering services for mobile phones used by minors. Some local governments have taken that one step further and amended child-protection ordinances to require companies to make it difficult to disable such filtering services, heralding a trend towards an age where “filtering” will be synonymous with the appropriate use of the Internet for minors. As the range of Internet-capable devices grows—from mobile phones to game machines and smart phones—parents and guardians are also being forced to become involved with these devices as well.
　However, parents and guardians are not always sufficiently informed about these devices, and even though filtering has always assumed the active participation of the user, there are some products and services that are not easily configured to conform with the wishes of parents and guardians.

　The three companies that founded this Study Group are providers of filtering technology, and they established this group because they believe it necessary for researchers and parents and guardians to work together to survey the current situation and examine the issues, and to collect and compile the suggestions from the community, in order to improve the above situation.
　The Study Group will conduct hearings with parents and guardians, educators, industry representatives, and government agencies to discover what the ideal filtering service would be, and to deliver to service providers a set of guidelines, and to parents and guardians, information on the proper use of filtering.
　The Study Group will operate from April to November of this year. The executive office will be managed by NetSTAR and Yahoo! JAPAN, while Digital Arts will assist in group operation.

Study Group Summary
Name: Parental Filtering Study Group
Term: April to November 2010 (tentative)
Members (in alphabetical order):
Abe, Keiichi (Professor, Department of Information Science, Aichi Institute of Technology)
Izuka, Hidenori (Chair, Gunma Children’s Safety Net Activity Committee)
Ito, Kenichi (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social and Information Studies, Gunma University)
Sakamoto, Akira (Professor, Department of Psychology, Ochanomizu University)
Shimoda Hirotsugu (Director, Association of Media Study)
Shintani, Tamae (President, the Tokyo Elementary School Parent-Teacher Association) 　
Taki, Mitsuru (Principal Researcher, Guidance and Counselling Research Center, National Institute for Education Policy Research)
Executive Office: NetSTAR, Yahoo! JAPAN
Operational Assistance: Digital Arts, Inc.