Dear fellow members of ICANN,As a young person,
not yet 18, I have had a significant interest over a number of years in the place
young people have online. Like many other young people, I was creating 'online communities',
buying stuff online and creating content suitable for those in my age group, before
most adults had heard about e-mail, let alone Amazon.com. Over the Internet's short
life with a mass-audience, children and teenagers have been the pacesetters. For
this reason, I find the notion that a company composed solely of adults should utterly
control a .kids domain name, without one iota of mandated (or even mentioned) youth
involvement, beyond the pale.
I've heard a rumour that young people are not capable
at organising things - that they can't handle big (or small) ideas or tasks, and
that adults must therefore do everything for them. I don't know who started this
rumour, but it is unfortunate that it has permeated even the most 'progressive' areas
of our society, those associated with the information revolution -- for it is a fiction.
Carol
Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF made a very good speech on this matter which
you can find at http://www.unicef.org/exspeeches/99esp2.htm
Don't get me wrong.
I'm all for there being a specific TLD for the kids and youth demographic. There
are plenty of youth based organisations and projects which would benefit dramatically
from having such a space focusing on, and adaptable to their needs.
However, it
would be wonderful, I believe, if young people themselves had control over their
space - just as trade unions propose to control their dot.union space, and the World
Health Organisation representing the medical sector proposes to control dot.health.
Obviously, this 'ownership' is a tad impractical when it comes to youth. Unlike workers
in unions, young people are terribly organised. They don't all belong to little 'youth
groups' which are part of the bigger picture, connected in federations at the national
level and again internationally. And those groups that do go some way to global youth
representation like Scouts are, to put it mildy, apolitical and retrogressive. Not
putting too fine a point on it, who is going to pay the $50,000 non-refundable deposit?
Certainly not your average young person working at McDonalds!
There are projects
afoot, and good ones, which aim to organise youth. There are a few, like the one
I work with, Nation1 (www.nation1.net), which attempt to utilise modern day technology
to do this, to give youth a voice online and off. But none has the resources to operate
a domain name space -- so far.
A solution is available here, one that is pragmatic
and fair. Put simply, dot.kids needs to be run by adults, but young people need to
be involved every step of the way -- not just as consumers, but as advisors (hey,
young people know more about youth than adults!), participants, AND as board members.
And ALL profits from such a space should be put back into youth developmental projects,
not just a small percentage.
A few months back, David Sontag posted a pretty important
note asking why those under 16 were excluded from voting within IEARN on the critical
issues relating to the technical governance of the Internett, and the social structure
which arises from there - considering those not yet 'adult' make up such a large
proportion of the Internet's population.
What I want to know is why ICANN does
not, at the very least, have an independent youth advisory body. In my home
country of Australia, there are certainly few governing bodies (at a local, state
of Federal level) that do not have a youth committee -- or have a spot reserved for
a young person within their 'proper' board. I myself am a young person on the National
Advisory Council of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (our equivilent of the
BBC or CBC in Canada). Our website is at http://www.abc.net.au/corp/nac/. It just
so happens that youth issues, how to make ABC programming/marketing relevant to the
needs of young people is a key issue the council has to address. I try (and believe
I succeed) in providing that perspective. I would be more than happy to provide further
assistance in conceptualising the place/role/logistics of such a body within ICANN.
I
will be looking forward to reading the other proposals for .kids domain names as
they come online. One thing is certain: ICANN must consider the needs and involvement
of young people within a .kids or .youth domain name to be a critical criteria, in
assessing their relative merits.
Perhaps if you don't, you'll realise how active
and noisy young people can be.
warm regards,
Nick Moraitis, age 17