I would like to suggest that the .kids proposals (and
similar content-limited
proposals such as .xxx) be scrapped. As well
as international disagreements over
content (many Islamic countries
would deem much material freely available in the
US unsuitable for
adults, let alone for children, for instance), there are many
disagreements
within countries over classifications - even if one
believes any such should be
done, which I do not. Much material that
some parents (e.g., fundamentalists)
believe their children should not
receive is the exact material that others (such
as myself) believe is
exactly what they _should_ receive; a primary example is
sex
education. Moreover, attempts to exclude "hate speech" are inevietably
biased
toward dominant cultures, insofar as speech against minority
portions of those
cultures is not labelled "hate speech" but the
reverse is not true. I point to
the labelling of the pentagram (an
ancient pagan symbol) by many schools as "satanic"
or a "gang symbol"
as one primary example of this. Moreover, religious (or
anti-religious)
prostletization is inevietably a form of speech
against those who do not hold
the same views as the author - and it
inevietably becomes "hate speech" given
the emotions involved. Ultimately, I do not believe that children's access to
information should be censored. How, precisely, are children supposed to learn the
ever-more-important skill of sorting through information, without having as wide
a variety of information as they desire to distinguish between? If the information
is pre-selected (particularly pre-selected on non-objective criteria, as the proposal
seeks to do),
they cannot learn this skill from it - and, as the Internet grows,
this
skill becomes more and more important. -Allen
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