Quite simply, ICANN cannot establish a .kids domain without both
biasing the Internet
in favor of a certain variety of speech (namely
that proposed by the .kids TLD
administrators) and increasing
censorship, both of children and of adults. Yes,
adults. Do you
seriously believe that the various countries who are in favor of
censoring
content for adults _won't_ use a .kids domain as an additional filter? They can tighten
up their attempted filtering on
everything else, if there's something (i.e., educational
material)
in .kids that they're letting through.Furthermore, there is a fundamental
difference in leaving a child
unattended in "real life" and letting that child
see uncensored
information. Unless you've been silly enough to tell your kids
your
credit card information, they can't do any harm to themselves with
online
action only - meeting a "pedophile" takes physical action,
for instance. If you
believe that people can harm themselves by
viewing images, I'd like to ask if
you're in favor of preventing
viewing "Schindler's List" (or the nightly news,
for that matter...).
If you want to believe that _any_ image viewing can harm
someone,
there's a lot more evidence for violent images doing so than there
is
for sexually explicit images. (All the research has shown so far
is that they're
arousing... not a real surprise.)
Moreover, none of the entities which would use
a .kids domain for
censoring what children can access (parents, governments, and
schools
being chief among them) can be trusted to not filter out information
that
any rational individual would agree that children should have
access to, namely
sex education (lifesaving, particularly with
AIDS and high rates of non-heterosexual
teen suicide). (Other areas
include material on alternative religions such as
my own (Unitarian
Universalist) paganism.) Not only will it be easier to do general
web
filtering with a .kids domain in existence, even if the .kids TLD
administrators
are more rational than to filter out the above
information (despite demands from
fundamentalists and other
pro-censorship forces to do so), it will be easier to
filter a limited
.kids domain further than to try filtering down the entire web.
All
in all, what people quite simply need to learn to do is to trust
their children.
Parents can't mold their children into what they
want them to be like; they have
to accept that their children are
their own selves.
-Allen