Powder is merely a standard way to pass around "good housekeeping's seal of approval", which has less substantive content than "Ron Jeremy gives this 4 stiffies". (The problem is not passing around these tokens, it's what they actually mean. POWDER, at best, punts, and is more likely to say something like "good housekeeping means good stuff".)
The standard is also full of moronic blather like "Online child protection, as well as the continuation of offline child protection, is a priority for any responsible site or service provider, whether directed at children or not."
Okay - I'm being a bit unfair. It also has stuff to produce bad results "Web pages and whole Web sites containing any type of rich assets such as video/streaming video or audio can be tagged with that information using POWDER. A search engine, content aggregation or adaptation service can then determine whether a user is accessing content via a low or high bandwidth connection and return only those pages that contain assets and images that will be supported by that user's connection speed." (Think of all the ways this will do the wrong thing.)
And then there's a new way to do stuff that already works: "A user pays an extra fee to his ISP in order to have privileged access to third-party premium content. When he accesses a premium page on one of these third-party Web sites via his ISP, the server is able to recognize him as a paying customer and deliver the content that has been described as premium by an associated Description Resource."