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.