.kids
How to protect kids from wandering into bad neighborhoods on the internet without resorting to censorship? That’s the question tackled by Jonah Goldberg and Nick Schulz at The National Review. They propose a new domain name, .kids.
Here is one proposal. Right now, there are many “top-level domains” — .com, .org, .biz, .gov, .edu., etc. We propose the creation of a .kids domain that would be strictly reserved for material appropriate for minors 18 years and under. Most sites would probably be able to mirror themselves on a .kids domain with little to no extra effort. Most corporations, schools, and other organizations have perfectly harmless material that kids and teens can view without causing their parents to stay up at night. The sites of the Smithsonian, McDonald’s, Disney, PBS, and countless other institutions are already perfectly safe for minors. Other websites would need a little tweaking, but not much. Only a relative handful of them — porn, dating services, adult-themed chat rooms, R-rated movie sites, et al. — would be explicitly barred from the .kids domain. The others would simply have to tone down or pare down their offerings.
It would allow parents to have some control over content:
Merely creating a new domain wouldn’t create a neighborhood or safe zone for kids. But it would give the private sector the wherewithal to help parents, without handing jurisdiction of content over to the government or requiring parents to rely on notoriously unreliable filters. Programming a browser to recognize only a .kids address would be simple. Devices and software could be designed to make it impossible for kids to wander into bad neighborhoods.
This beats censoring the internet, they say:
Nothing would be taken away; new options would merely be created.
I doubt that anyone would argue that a technological answer can completely solve the problem of how to protect kids online. But it would be one more tool that parents could use.
[...] guess this is an argument for the .kids [...]