[xoa]

Yes, exactly, this should be really simple as a foundation: by default the Internet is for adults. All of it. Where it's desirable for things to be available for kids, create the economic incentive and easy tools for parents to use and run on a white list, not a black list.

I'd actually go somewhat further though and ask whether it's a good idea to even do this via web pages at all. We have a great potential system for this already: DNS. Do something useful amongst all the ridiculous vanity and spam TLDs for once and set up a ".kids" gTLD, or ccTLD for that matter so that different countries can set their own regulatory standards naturally (ie, .kids.us, .kids.uk etc). Domains could also be used for some broad buckets for people who don't want to drill in, ie, .1-6.kids, .7-12.kids, .13-17.kids, or whatever is deemed appropriate, but simple age brackets that would offer some sane defaults. 1-6 could simply not allow any ads, user generated content or algorithmic feeds whatsoever for example. There are a lot of knobs to turn. And then at the registry level it can be ensured from the get-go that anyone getting a .kids domain is fully identified, located in the country in question, has valid ID, has specific credentials or is an accredited organization, or whatever other criteria makes sense.

But ultimately the point would be to create something that is built right from the ground up, and in turn that doesn't interfere with what has already been built at all. Something that can also be worked with at the gateway and thus cover every device on a LAN, and for that matter can easily be plugged into the vast number of powerful tools we have for working with that stuff. It'd be easy to put a nice UI on all this, even to make it higly automated. For example, have a setup wizard where you enter children, put in date of birth for each, and it'll spit out a password for each one. This then auto-provisions the network such that each kid has their own VLAN (password for PPSK or even wired connection) and is automatically limited to the domain groups of their age bracket, which then changes as their age changes.

Parents should be able to dig further in and get more granular with content categories, metadata for which could be required for anyone hosting a site within that domain, but I think there is the potential to make something both pretty bullet proof and pretty accessible, using existing tech stacks, and without impinging on the present internet at all including privacy and anonymity.

[bruce511]

A .kids domain is not a useful approach.

The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral. For example my church a web site, the bakery down the road has one, the local pro sport team has one. They're not designed "for kids", but kids are welcome.

Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions?

If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible to 16yo there needs to be at least kids.uk and kids.au.

Does OpenSSL.org or OpenSSL.com get to be OpenSSL.kids?

Sorry but duplicating the entire neutral internet domain space with yet another tld isn't a helpful approach.

[thecrash]

That's the trouble though - those friendly neighborhood sites can generally be assumed to be appropriate for kids, but if we create the expectation that they must ensure they are appropriate for certain age brackets simply by virtue of being online, those sites will cease existing.

Instead of running their own websites, they'll migrate to a platform like Facebook. That way Meta handles the burden of moderation and the legal complaints for the inevitable moderation failures.

[xoa]

>A .kids domain is not a useful approach.

I surprisingly seriously disagree, and think you're perhaps missing a lot of the contention in this whole societal debate. The point is to give people workable tools with some level of agreed sane defaults they can make use of, tweak, or ignore entirely, without imposing any burden at all on the existing internet and its adult (or children with parents who wish it) users.

>The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral

First: by who's standards is one of the core questions! What's neutral to one parent may not be to another. You illustrate this with your very first example in fact, "For example my church a web site". There are religious parents (and no doubt atheist ones as well) who would quite strongly not want their young child to visit your church's website.

Second: there is a difference between simply wanting to be child friendly and taking on a legal obligation and liability to be child "safe" to some given standard. Parents would be perfectly free to whitelist whatever additional sites they liked, or to subscribe to lists that curated whitelists of various sorts, or to use other controls. But a politically significant number of parents clearly want assurance that their child will near-never (with actual enforcement mechanisms for failure) encounter something outside of bounds. Meeting that need requires either whitelists or the sort of restrictions that would wreck the current web (and probably still not work very well).

>Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions?

If the parents of said kids want it to, then yes? Why would that be a big deal? I'd be surprised if like most places SO doesn't already have piles of domains purely for defensive purposes, and as something nationally regulated I certainly envision such a domain registrar being dirt cheap (or even free, paid for by tax dollars) for domains. Given the context and that it'd be very much not open to all there isn't any need to worry about cost to dissuade scammers and such, they'd be prevented from ever registering in the first place. Rules around use of trademark, business names and so on could also be very strict.

>If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible to 16yo there needs to be at least kids.uk and kids.au.

Yes? DNS is not expensive. And again, parents don't need to make use of it. This would be for those who do, who are right now pushing for ID for everything. It's a safe default walled garden, but one with doors any parent can open.

>Does OpenSSL.org or OpenSSL.com get to be OpenSSL.kids?

Which one chooses to get accredited by a regulator or child protection organization with insurance and so on first? Why are you asserting either would even bother? Which one would be happy about having to verify ID of users right now?

>Sorry but duplicating the entire neutral internet domain space with yet another tld isn't a helpful approach.

Sorry but you haven't thought about this very clearly at all. This proposal is very explicitly a small subset of the entire neutral internet! Duplication is never something I suggested, rather the very opposite! The "entire neutral internet" is by default adult here, but parents would be able to allow children to browse it just as now. However, some are clearly unhappy with that, enough that we're seeing politicians respond with things that would be very bad.

[lokar]

I think it really needs to be per-page.

And, if we are going to do this the “design” should be global and anticipate a range of cultures.

[l72]

That’s like saying movies should have to rate every scene so a 7 year old can watch the “safe” parts of an R movie?

If a site is really mixing so much content (like Reddit) then they should really be separating their sites into different subdomains.

[lokar]

For every different counties rating system? What about Wikipedia?