Parental Controls

I wanted to set up the parental controls, using a new copy of NIS 2010, and it just launches online.family.norton.com, which now wants me to set up an account. I'm assuming that this is the expected behavior, but it's not what I expected, so now I'm wondering exactly what the parental controls do and how it works.  The help is extremely sparse and would not have lead me to expect to be tossed to an on-line account.