A legislative proposal for setting up a new sub-domain name
called .kids was yesterday approved by a panel of the US Congress,
according to a report by news agency Reuters. The domain would be
intended for children under 13 and would be policed for unsuitable
content.
In November 2000, US politicians had hoped that ICANN would
approve a proposal for a .kids generic top level domain. However,
ICANN rejected the idea, partly because it would be difficult to
control. If promoted as a safe area for children, there is
potentially more harm when unsuitable material appears within that
area.
NeuStar, the registry for the newly restructured .us country
code top level domain, will instead create .kids as a sub-domain.
Accordingly, all the domain names will end “.kids.us”.
The plan is to make it easier for parents to control the sites
that their children can access. They can set their browsers to only
view .kids.us sites. However, this creates other issues for
NeuStar. Under the bill approved yesterday, NeuStar has
responsibility for policing the sub-domain and it will be
answerable to the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications
and Information Administration.
