Congress: A 'Safe Place' for Kids Online

The House Telecommunications Subcommittee approved a bill March 7 that would create a "safe zone" on the Internet for children. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), one of the bill's co-sponsors, says the new "kids.us" domain would resemble "a safe playground with fences around it," similar to the children's section in a public library. If adopted by Congress, the domain could go live as early as July.

Here's how the new domain would work. Qualified companies and organizations would be limited to posting online materials suitable for kids ages 13 and under. Parents who want to restrict what their children see would set their home Internet browsers exclusively to those Web sites with a kids.us designation. NeuStar, the company that oversees ".us," plans to create an independent committee to establish criteria for applying for inclusion in the new domain, says spokeswoman Barbara Blackwell.

The idea of a safe place on the Internet for kids started in the fall of 2000, when several Internet-related companies lobbied for a global "dot-kids" domain. But the request was denied by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international group that approves Internet domain names, because of the difficulty in establishing rules that would apply worldwide (see "Creating a Net 'Safe Zone' ," Dec. 2001). A House bill forcing ICANN to establish such a domain was debated in 2001, but it proved unworkable.