Dot Kids “R” Us
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for February 2003
I was halfway out my office door on my way to grab a quick swim the other day when the phone rang. Fighting the urge to let it ring, I answered it and found myself talking to a woman from a local radio station asking whether I’d be willing to be interviewed that afternoon. President Bush had just signed the legislation authorizing the creation of the new .kids.us domain, and would I be able to answer a few questions on the air?
Since I’d only heard about the legislation briefly and knew relatively little about it, I hesitated; but not knowing what I’m talking about never stopped me before. So I said yes, took a couple of hours to research it, squeezed in a few laps along the way, and called her back.
I dug up a few news accounts about the new domain, and the more I read, the more questions I had. I had gotten the call because I served as an expert witness in the lawsuit challenging the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), and somebody from the university made the connection. I don’t profess to be an expert on the filtering issue per se, but I do know just enough to be skeptical about both the technology and the ideas behind legislation such as CIPA—and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and the rest.
A kid-friendly domain
The .kids.us thing sounds like a great idea: Set up a separate domain within .us (the United States’ national top-level domain, like Canada’s .ca or Japan’s .jp) where “kid-friendly” sites could be found. Sites within that domain could only point to other .kids.us sites, no unmoderated instant messaging or chat would be permitted, and browsers could be configured to only permit access therein.
So far so good. The United States failed to convince ICANN, the people who administer the overall Internet domain space, to create a top-level .kids a few years ago (preferring such more popular favorites as .info, .biz, and—seriously—.aero for the aerospace industry. No kidding). So they went ahead and carved out part of .us.
This plan has a number of unresolved questions: Who is going to make decisions? It appears to be left to the domain-name registrar (Neustar, a private contractor), who is directed to develop standards and processes for decision-making, appeals, and so on. What language there is in the act about what materials will be excluded as “harmful to minors” (defined as children 12 and younger) is a little odd and looks more like the legal definition of obscenity than anything else.
In the signing ceremony for the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002, President Bush alluded to .kids.us as being like the children’s section of the library. Fine. Let’s take him at his word. As someone who is close to him knows, any library needs a librarian to be truly effective. Thus this new space needs the professionalism, judgment, and skills of librarians as well.
It seems likely that this thing is going to be implemented within the next year, so we ought to be there and build superior sites for that domain. Somebody somewhere is going to get control of library.kids.us; I’d think we’d all prefer that it be a library or librarian, yes?
Work from the inside
It might well be better to be on the inside of this trying to make it work. This is a tremendous and highly visible opportunity to demonstrate the value of selection, evaluation, collection development, instruction on information literacy, and the other aspects of librarianship. We’ve been making the argument over the last several years that these approaches are preferable to filtering software; now we get to prove that’s true.
This is the latest attempt at legislation to try to help people feel more secure about what their kids can and can’t see on the Internet. The Communications Decency Act was hopelessly overbroad, and neither COPA nor CIPA have been entirely successful at passing constitutional muster. It might just be possible that this idea, if done successfully, could put an end to this legislative parade and we can all get on with the truly important business of making the Internet the best possible place it can be, for everyone. If not, I can think of lots worse ways this could play out. But that’s another story.
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