RE: Protect the unwitting; particularly the young!

[Reed Lee <reedlee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with much of what Doc Trammel has to say in response
to Adrian J. Cemel's comments.  I write separately to emphasize
a point I made in an earlier comment (and which is equivalent to
a point which Brandon Shalton has also made on these pages).

Adrian Cemel is certainly correct that many, many, many general
web sites are appropriate and indeed beneficial to children.  To
recall an example I used earlier on these pages, NASA's web site
would be perfectly appropriate for children as it is for anyone
interested in space science and exploration.

Under a .kids solution, NASA could surely get a .kids domain
name to point to the same web site as its .gov name does.

Now, here's the difference between that scenario and .xxx:
If an adult webmaster keeps its .com address, that will effec-
tively defeat .xxx filtering because that scheme relies on what
I've called "filtering out" (and what Brandon Shalton refers to
as "blacklisting").

On the other hand, one of several elegant features of "filtering
in" (Shaton's "whitelisting") is that it actually _works_ in a cumula-
tive fashion  So in the example I gave, children get to the NASA
site through .kids _and_ adults get there either through .kids or
.gov.

And again, if general sites adopted this cumulative approach,
there would be so many .kids registrations that the average
cost could fall to truly trivial levels and still provide funding for
free .kids registrations for deserving nonprofits and a robust
enforcement agency to keep .kids clean.

There are several other robust and elegant features of a filtering
in mechanism which deserve further consideration.