The Future of the kids.us Internet Domain

MxReb0 writes "The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will host a half-day forum, entitled 'The kids.us Internet Domain: Developing a Safe Place on the Internet for Children.' kids.us is a new direction of the www, overseen by the Department of Commerce and now offering registration. The forum will address the current state of the kids.us domain and future content and applications for the space. Will only allowing .kids.us sites be the new direction for a kid-safe internet?"

Comments

Thank goodness

[nes11]

Thank goodness we soon will no longer have to actually pay attention to our children ourselves! Our society will be so much better off once we don't have to take any responsibility for our kids.

Filtering?

[aridhol]

Will only allowing .kids.us sites be the new direction for a kid-safe internet?

Damn, I hope not. One reason is that I'm not in the USA, nor are many internet users; maybe a kids.ca, kids.uk, kids.au, etc would be good for other standards of what's kid-safe.

Also, it looks like the sites are hand-picked by someone. I don't trust them to select enough of the right sites to allow kids to make informed decisions about things like religion, politics, etc (and yes, I think kids are capable of making these decisions if we allow it).

Re:Filtering?

[goldspider]

"I don't trust them to select enough of the right sites to allow kids to make informed decisions about things like religion, politics, etc (and yes, I think kids are capable of making these decisions if we allow it)."

Can we let kids be kids? I don't think (potentially) controversial information needs to be in a kids' domain.

If a kid needs to research something of a more mature nature, they can ask their parent(s) to use the full Internet (and the parent(s) can supervise the use).

That isn't censoring or restricting information from kids. It keeps control of it where it should be: with the parent(s).

must be said...

[contrasutra]

The internet will NEVER be safe for kids by themselves. This is simply due to the fact that parents have different views on what is "safe" and "acceptable". Hell, a science website about evolution is unacceptable to millions of parents.

So what I am saying is: this didn't/doesnt work with TV (though that is debatable I guess) and it wont work with the internet. You can't rely on ratings or screenings to do the job of a good parent.

The internet is an amazing thing for kids. It opens them to the whole world, and that can be both a scary and enlightening place. You can learn about anything you want on the internet, and it's even more accessable than a library. Kids should not be quickly banned from this tool. The internet is information, and kids must be exposed to it, BUT kids must have parents to put it in context.

I am very bias of course. I have always been given 100% access to the internet since I was 8. I never looked at pornography (I honestly never felt the need), and although I looked at different hate sites,etc, I only did it to get a view of the other side (I disagree with them, if you need reassuring). Im still rather young, but I can't imagine what my life would be like if my parents didn't let me have unaltered access to the internet. For one, I found a hobby I love, and I am never afraid to learn something new. If someone is discussing something I know nothing about, I simply do some reading on it.

Sorry to be offtopic, but I've had this on my mind for a while. Letting me have access to the internet as a little kid was probably a risky thing for my parents to do, but I grew up (IMO) ethical and more sensitive than most (I still cant stand the site of violence, even though I see it plenty (cant escape it)). I guess I assume if I turned out fine (better in fact!), than most kids will, and that's naive (also elitist, but hell, I'm a member of slashdot :P).

Safe place?????

[pbox]

Safe like McDonalds, or safe like Mr. Rogers?

There *IS* a difference.

As per beforewisdom (729725)'s sig:

Fast Food: Corporate America in your body
Television: Corporate America in your mind.

Need to add:

kid.us: Corporate America in your spawned ones.

Re:Kids.us domains are $100 per year!

[orthogonal]

Have any of you tried *registering* these domains? They're $100 per year!

Then it becomes more clear why the U.S. Dept. of Commerce is backing this: "kids.us" will be shorthand for "kids.advertised.to.by.us.corporations".

$100 is nothing for a company, but it's a bit steep for individuals or even not-for-profit sites.

So we will see "disney.kids.us" and "mattel.barbie.kids.us" and "sugary.breakfast.cereals.kids.us", but not "teach.yourself.origami.kids.us." or even "intractive.math.kids.us".

Eventually, a few non-profit sites will gets grants to set themselves up in the kids.us TLD, as fig-leaf to "prove" it's not purely for corporations.

Then you'll see astro-turfing groups funded by corporations and fronted by "Parents'" and "Christian" organizations agitate to restrict most library and public school machines to the "kids.us" TLD -- and a lot of schools (libraries tend to be a bit more thoughtful) will do this just to make life easier for lazy computer admins and controversy-fearing school system bureaucrats.

And then lazy parents will spend $59.95 on software filters that restrict home browsing to "kids.us".

Pretty soon, many homes and most schools and libraries will be locked down, and kids locked into, an internet that presents only approved corporate beliefs and, of course, massive amounts of advertising -- traditional and "product placement" -- directed at the captive audience of kids.

Then any site that desires to have kids as at audience at all will have to get a "kids.us" domain, and submit to the periodic governmental review of content that entails. Unpopular minority viewpoints will of course not be allowed "kids.us" domains: gays, minority religions, neo-Nazis, sex education, pro-gun, pro-abortion, all will be kept out "for the good of the children".

Even "disturbing" sites, like those with pictures of Nazi atrocities at death camps (not to mention the less terrible but still terrible U.S. atrocities at Abu Ghraib), or those discussing banned books will have to be toned down, made more bland and "life affirming". Just as pornography on the net is regulated by the "community standards" of the most restrictive communities, the Dept. of Commerce will come under pressure to apply Podunk's standards to the entire "kids.us" TLD.

Just as "[f]our members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee (1983) called for the rejection of [The Diary of Anne Frank] because it is a "real downer", school boards in Alabama, Tennessee and rural Pennsylvania will lobby the Dept. of Commerce censors to exclude web sites about Anne Frank or evolution or gay rights or Wicca. A careful blandness and a spurious "balance of opinions" will reign, just as it does in U.S. high school textbooks, the publishers of which must cater to the large and largely conservative Texas State Schoolboard's opinions: "evolution is an unproven theory, and many believe that an Intellgent Designer created mankind".

Since inclusion in the "kids.us" TLD will be voluntary, it will be claimed that government review of content isn't censorship, but sites will learn to self-censor to avoid attracting the government censors' attention. As more and more sites get involved in "kids.us", it will become taken for granted that government review of site content is normal and even good. Sites that don't submit to governmental content review will be marginalized and tainted by association: "if there is nothing bad on that site, how come they won't let the government check for it?" the typical parent or school principal will ask.

Effectively, "kids.us" will become a means for corporations to advertise to children, another place where dissenting opinions are tidied up and swept under the rug "for the children", a vehicle for producing another generation of safely bland and unopinionated consumers.

First the children, then the world!

[DarkVein]

Censoring children is the indecency argument, abstracted by a generation or two. If you "protect the children" from all the things you don't want anyone to see, with a strong repetitive message about the badness of sneaking a peak of whatever it is, the theory is that most people will grow up not wanting to see it. More likely, they will grow up with an involuntary emotional knee-jerk to the thought of exposure to any of the "bad" things, and actively endorse suppression of such "bad" material. For the children.

I suppose the desire is to have a self-moralizing population, so that as much as society as possible is on auto-pilot on the proper moral course. There are problems with this desire. The first is the emotional and religious nature, or at least the description, of the problems. This prevents objective analysis of effects of content exposure. (Boobs := Bad.) It also leads to indiscriminate classification, which just means indiscriminate action or inaction regarding content.

Now, there's a lot of research that says that an imbalanced exposure to certain kinds of stimulus, violence for instance, leads to unstable behavior. I've never seen anything concrete that says exposure to such content corrupts; just the natural assessment that too much of anything is a bad thing.

Anyhow, getting back to my original point, the purpose of efforts like this is to form the mental and emotional structure of the generation which will win the battle for morality and indecency. It's not a conspiracy. It's just an emotional desire by a lot of people who've already had such an upbringing, who want to extend it, and have found an outlet for that desire. I consider it insidiously damaging to an enlightened, scientific, [classical] liberal, OR scientific nation, as all four of which the ".us" was founded. That is, the effects are insidious, not the desire or the intentions of those wishing for this.

Personally, I've found that I have a sort of natural morality built into my consciousness. I think it's empathy. It guides my every emotion. Pain, exploitation, deceit, humiliation, they all repel me, probably as I've experienced some very minute facet of them in my life, and I can very clearly read the same feelings in others as if they were my own. I don't hate myself, don't wish to experience that, so I don't wish it on others, so some 9/10ths of all pornography turns me off or does nothing for me. I find empathy, along with reason, to be God's natural gifts to humanity to use to determine morality. Perhaps we took them from the Tree of Knowledge. Either way, I know what's right and wrong, and I've learned to see it in the world through my free exposure to information from an early age. Along with liberty and contextual guidance, a good good prescription of physical touch and affection should give you the greatest and brightest sorts of youth.