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There already is a .kids.us sub-domain of the .US TLD. The managing company does content enforcement.

http://kids.us/ was a manual attempt in that direction. It seems mostly dormant.

There are so many things which can go wrong with such a service, especially if you try to automate it: You might pick up something erroneously. Domain ownership or content changes suddenly. An inappropriate advertisement is included. Google would have to be right every time, or someone will spot the mistake and unleash the hellhounds. Parents are rather nervous about what their children might potentially see on the Internet, even if it is a restricted subset.

I'm also sure that many parents think that Star Wars isn't suitable for six-year-olds.

Like .kids.us?

The doc you linked does mention a different idea that I could get behind though, establish a .kids which would be a semi-walled garden of child appropriate material.

That's been tried, via an administered second-level domain, .kids.us

From the link, It's the first and only "youth-friendly" Web space to be established by the United States government, and it features advanced technical, policy and operational mechanisms that keep young people informed, entertained and protected online.

> a better solution is to create a domain that only has child-friendly material on it. Like creating a town with NO guns allowed.

The US government already did this: http://www.kids.us/ . You can register whatever.kids.us, if you agree to child-friendliness, according to their rules. That includes not linking to any site outside the .kids.us domain, and severely restricting 2-way communication (e.g. message boards, email links, etc.)...like you could probably have an email system where people chose from pre-configured sentences, or a myspace clone where all pics were chosen from a limited set of clip art, and no free-form text entry was allowed. The .kids.us system was required by congress when the .US domain was opened up for non-government registrations.

Problem is, few sites take advantage of kids.us; nearly all kid sites are NOT in kids.us. One problem may be that it appears there's a single monopolist in control of the domain registration; that means higher domain prices, and more importantly, any kid site in kids.us would put their entire business under the control of that monopolist. There may be other problems, too.

Which is too bad. I think the basic idea of kids.us is actually sound. We need to find a way to eliminate risks to the organizations signing up to kids.us, and and then encourage them to use it. If there were a "safe for the kids" area on the Internet, perhaps some of the other concerns would be reduced.

Well, I did think about that, but .us is already an existing TLD with existing policies. Better to start fresh with a new TLD rather than shoehorning a subdomain in there. Besides, kids.us already exists with the very same stated goal of being a kid-safe area. It doesn't seem to have caught on.

You know what? It's available! kids.us is a domain area that only allows "kid safe" web pages.

Czech it out!

Not just US corporations - government agencies, too.

For instance, observe the scary-as-fuck Owl of Doom on the NOAA's site.

So simply put, the way to deal with .kids and .sex is to have an AUP that has a requirement banning linking from .sex to .kids and .kids to .sex. Make the registar of .sex and .kids the same . Have a content review procedure for .kids, like the one in .kids.us. If there is a .sex found to be any linking to a .kids, it violates the AUP, and then it gets it .sex pulled for violating the AUP. The legal issues are rendered moot. In order to get a .sex or .kids you agree to the AUP. After all there are AUP on .tw, .nu, .de, .uk, .cn and .us. Some of them are residency requirements, but some are a whole lot more.

Check out this anatomical mummy bear, for which there is a thinly veiled advertisement at http://summum.kids.us.

Actually, there is a .kids.us domain that requires sites to be approved by Neustar (the people that run .us) before final activation can be required.

Maybe they can offer a contract to Google to spider the whole domain, but in addition offering a kids friendly search engine, Google could also do the cross checks by having the special bots that spider it also check all the links for anything that isn't kids.us, lock those out of the kids.us search engine database, and report them to the appropriate agency handling it. When a link is found that goes to a non-kids.us site, the domain owner is called up by that agency (their emergency contact info might be part of the registration requirement) and told to remove it within the hour, or their domain name gets disabled (which could be done faster if the kids.us zone file has short TTL settings on all the delegations). Since the technology exists to isolate the upper level domain names, such as Slashdot uses to optionally show them to you in postings, it could easily be extended to totally block out the link if it's not to kids.us, or even reject the posting altogether. The problem is more a social one of making people actually do it since way too many people (adults here) are too clueless to understand how to make things right. So we shouldn't be seeing a goatse.cx or urinalpoop.org showing up if they do it right.

There are lots of different kinds of spoofing, so I don't know which you are referring to, so I can't give a specific example of how to prevent it. But the obvious part is that there are at least 2 levels of protection parents can engage. The light level is simply make sure the kids start on a kids.us portal. Then as long as the site operators do what they are supposed to, the kids will be safe. The stronger level is to configure the browser so that when the kids are logged in to the computer, it won't allow access to any web content (including images, Java, CSS, whatever) which isn't found by means of a kids.us domain lookup. So the URLs with IP addresses won't work, either.

One form of spoofing you may be referring to is stuff like emailed URLs that look like a kids.us URL, but in fact go to somewhere else. But that's an issue of whether the parents allow the kids to use software that would access some other domain. By using the stronger level of protection, even opening spam with these links will fail, as long as the program displaying it goes through the same mechanisms to find the site (which I believe is the case on Windows). The content actually in that mail is another issue. Since almost everything in email can be forged, you might not want to allow your kids access to email unless you have some stronger protection to ensure they are getting it only from other kids you approve of. Restricting kids to web based email on a kids.us webmail site, that by extension of the law should only communicate with other such sites and not to any outside of the kids.us domain, and not by SMTP which could spoof that, should keep your kids safe.

I don't believe the law is requiring you as a parent to restrict your kids to this domain, but rather, is giving you this as an option, so that if you choose to, you can set up the computer to limit itself to kids.us and actually leave your child unattended for a while at the computer with more confidence than you would have today. My worry, though, is that this might be just the first step to more laws, or case law, in the future. Consider a court deciding to take children away from their parents and the fact that the parents didn't restrict their kids to kids.us on the computer was what tipped the scale in the case. That would open up a whole lot of new problems that I can see. And I'm afraid a case like that will happen within a few years.