US Bill Calls For .kids.us

Nice idea, but is it enough?

Submitted by Jeff Howden on March 7, 2002 - 18:57.

Ok, so we give the kids a clean place to play. What happens when they go out in to the real world -- the big, bad Internet? Well, they're still going to be bombarded with porn if they're not careful.

I personally don't have a problem with someone who wants to run a business, as long as it's legal. However, as businesses in the adult industry in real life have had to do, I think adult businesses online should be required to meet certain strict guidelines.

However, with adult sites being allowed to operate in the normal space as all other business, it's difficult to sift out the compliant sites from the non-compliant sites (if you can even find them). To combat this, it would be as simple as creating a new top-level TLD — .xxx or .adult. All businesses engaging in adult oriented material would have to move their operations to a domain under this TLD. Any that do not would be open to fines and penalties for non-compliance — just like real life businesses would be for selling age-restricted goods to a minor.

Just my 2¢,

.jeff

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I agree

Submitted by isaac on March 7, 2002 - 19:11.

That would also make it easier for schools to block .xxx/.adult, without stopping teens having access to many things which are unfairly blocked by existing systems (e.g., breast cancer information, gay support, sexual education, etc).

But in conjunction with .kids, it might be most effective. There would be some sites not classified as XXX, but still not appropriate for a 10 year old. i.e., strong satire, etc.

On top of all of this, though, there would have to be some accounting for varying opinions on "adult material" and "appropriate for chilldren" throughout the world. Maintaining it within .us provides the US government with legal standing of course.

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More ICANN bashing

Submitted by bobince on March 10, 2002 - 16:19.

I think a .kids domain would be useful. It'd be much better as a TLD than stuck in .us, but ICANN's decision-making process does not seem geared to giving us useful new TLDs, only esoteric (eg. .museum) and pointless-but-potentially-profitable ones (eg. .biz).

We need a .xxx TLD (I personally find .sex a slightly preferably name for it) - not to enforce a segregation of porn from the mainstream, and not for censorship purposes, but simply to reduce the clutter in comnetorg, especially .com.

Other really useful TLDs would be .film, .band (or .music), .show (or .event), that sort of thing.

The current TLD creation process - arbitrary selection from a list of paid-for submissions from for-profit companies - does not yield good results. Hopefully Congress's plan will get the go-ahead.

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Re: More ICANN bashing

Submitted by luminosity on March 10, 2002 - 17:38.

SatireWire did a nice little piece on the choices for new TLDs.

Other than that: .sex would be a useful addition to the TLDs, however .kid wouldn't work, I feel. Firstly, there's too many established sites that wouldn't want to have to go out and get yet another domain, and also the net doesn't really have a large amount of content for kids, yet. Certainly not enough to justify a new TLD. However they could approve such things as.film and and the other suggestions.

One TLD I'd like to see made would be .club, because I've seen some websites which say they already use a .club. Someone made a deal with a few ISPs, to deal the domains registered with them as .club. Anyone not on these domains has to go through .something.net to get to the same site. When I saw it I couldn't believe the stupidity of the people who organised it - what happens if ICANN does approve a .club? The people who got this lot of .club addresses aren't going to be very happy.

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