Senate Toys With Kid-Safe Domain

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate on Thursday began formal consideration of a bill to create kids.us, a second-level Internet domain that would be designed to give parents some peace of mind about their kids' use of the Web by serving up only material deemed appropriate for children.

The Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space held a hearing on a Senate version of a bill that overwhelmingly passed the House earlier this year. Both the Senate and the House versions of the "Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002" (S. 2537 and H.R. 3833), aim to create a "green light" area under the .us country code that consists of sites with content appropriate for children 13 and under.

Under the Senate bill, kids.us Web sites would offer material deemed "suitable for and not harmful to minors." Lawmakers supporting it say the second-level domain would help make parents more aware of what sites their kids are surfing and in turn prevent kids from viewing pornography and other content harmful to minors on the Web. But civil liberties groups are wary.

Opposition Speaks Out

"We have two main concerns. The first is government should not be involved in content rules; the second is will it really be effective," says Center for Democracy and Technology policy analyst Rob Courtney. "Unless we somehow restrict children to only see things in dot kids, we haven't done a lot."

In a letter dated Thursday to the chairman and ranking member of the subcommittee, Alan Davidson, associate director of CDT, drove home those points, telling the subcommittee congressionally mandated creation of a kids.us domain would set a dangerous precedent for regulation of the domain name space. In addition it would create new concerns about free expression online and would be ineffective in protecting children from inappropriate content, Davidson says.

The creation and maintenance of kids.us under the Senate bill "inappropriately involves the government in making decisions about what material should and should not be available on the Internet," Davidson's letter to Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and George Allen (R- Virginia).

Expensive and Ineffective?

The Senate bill would require NeuStar, the Washington, D.C., company that has been administering the .us domain since March, to make decisions about what is suitable for minors and not harmful to minors. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration would oversee this effort, determining whether Neustar operates in accordance with the mandates of the bill.

To make kids.us effective for parents, the site must be aggressively maintained and monitored, the CDT says.

The kind of enforcement necessary to make the site safe for children would be expensive and difficult, and that money would be better spent educating children and parents how to be safe when using the Web and about the tools already available to filter inappropriate content, Courtney says.