Chat Room: Don't Fence Kids In

The idea of a dot-kids domain has been around almost as long as kids have been surfing the Web, but the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international body that establishes domains such as .com and .org, had refused to create .kids because what's considered suitable for 12-year-olds differs in each country. So in 2002, Congress decided to act alone, creating kids.us as a division of dot-us, the domain already being used by most public school districts in the United States, and which the federal government oversees.

NeuStar, the company that manages kids.us for the feds, calls the domain "a friendly and enjoyable environment for children." But living up to that goal will require a set of strictly monitored guidelines. NeuStar's guidelines state that all sites in the new domain will need to be "suitable for minors." At the very least, there will be no Web material in the domain involving sexual acts, nude bodies, or any site that advocates the use of drugs, weapons, alcohol, tobacco, or illegal gambling. But it's also expected that all kids.us sites will not link to any sites outside the kids.us domain.

On a fundamental level, this makes sense—of course we don't want kids leaving this newly created fenced-in yard. It's expected that once the kids.us domain takes off, Web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer and services like America Online will give parents and teachers the ability to "latch the fence" and allow children to visit only kids.us sites. Unless there's a massive effort by the Public Broadcasting System, museums, libraries, and other institutions that now provide Web content for those under 13 on kids.us, there may not be much for children to see there. I worry that only big commercial giants such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Kellogg's will have the resources and the time to create kids.us Web sites. How useful will students find kids.us? Sites created to sell products don't need links to the outside world; school and library sites do.

Any library or school that wants to be part of kids.us will need to create two versions of its children's site—the .org site and the kids.us site—because under the proposed guidelines, the kids.us site isn't allowed to link to the adult section of a public library's site. That means there'll be two sites that need updating, which will require twice the work. Will that be too much trouble for all but the largest libraries and school districts? Probably. There's also speculation in the Internet industry that few businesses and organizations will want to bother with maintaining a separate site with so many limitations and restrictions.

A new site for the Multnomah County (OR) Library with a kids.us domain, for example, would not be able to link to Scholastic's Captain Underpants site at www.scholastic.com/captainunderpants unless the Captain is also accessible at www.scholastic.kids.us/captainunderpants. Whether Scholastic does create such a version of the kids' section of its site will be a good indicator of the success of kids.us. Those in charge of the Scholastic Web site say they're "investigating" the possibility of setting up a kids.us version of their site.

When I recently spoke to a NeuStar representative, he said schools and libraries would be able to purchase kids.us addresses inexpensively, and that the company would encourage librarians to create kids.us versions of their sites. But will Multnomah County Library create a www.multcolib.kids.us? Kate Houston Mitchoff, manager of the library's well-known Homework Center (www.multcolib.org/homework), says that if it was up to her, she wouldn't take the trouble. Without the ability to link to the best sites, she says, "the kids site likely would become a sanitized, incomplete skeleton of the original site."