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Actually, having part of the hierarchy solely for kids would be a great idea, but not for the obvious reasons.

You should allocate kids.us (if you yanks are so worried about it, that's where it belongs, the rest of the world doesn't give a damn about it) for such content.

Then you could create penalties for posting "indecent" material into this subtree of DNS. Since we're talking about DNS, the penalties should go to the owner of the DNS domain. The meaning of "indecent" is irrelevant and can be anything (you'll see as I present my reasoning).

Now, when someone comes trying to do censorship "for the children", you can just point that there's a perfectly child-safe domain protected by laws, with very harsh penalties for not respecting its intended purpose. All of that would be true.

However, if you've had read the literature [rfc-archive.org] you'd know that making such guarantee is impossible. Therefore no sane person would get a subdomain of "kids.us". However any busybodies can be easily told they should stop complaining and use the tools given to them (after all, the subdomain would indeed be protected by laws, and they should really be enforced). If they balk at the prospect of having such punishments applied to them, telling them that they are obviously not that interested in the children and are clearly hypocrites (maybe they would be tempted to put something "indecent"? or maybe they just talk but aren't trully willing to take the responsibility to make a clean web for the future generations, blah, blah).

In the end, only extremists will be willing to get .kids.us domains, no sane people would be even interacting with that thing, parents would get to choose if they let their kids out of the walled garden (and if they fail to do so, when they wanted, then they're irresponsable parents), and everybody else gets to browse porn without being distracted by the think-of-the-children crowd.

I even have a slogan for the domain: "kids.us, the clean place for kids that sucks".

The most that can happen is that a few extremists get punished (or whatever) when the sites are inevitably hacked.

Problem solved.

I completely agree with all the problems you cite for a .kids type domain, and I completely agree the correct thing to do would be for people to use second level walledgarden.org type domains. However the world sucks, stupid people routinely demand idiotic and destructive things, and politicians all too often give it to them.

So while I agree with everything you say, I support a .kids type domain to the extent that it can be used to siphon off these people and their bad ideas. It provides an outlet where these people can satisfy their crusade-compulsion and they can play out their bad ideas. A place where they can fight with each other over all of the problems you list, a place they can do all the dumb things they like and cause all the damage they wish, all within a contained area. All without causing any harm or damage outside their pointless harmless .kids domain.

You're right the correct thing for them to do is just apply for a routine second level domain where they can do whatever they like, but obviously they already can do that, and obviously they are not going to be satisfied with that. These activists don't actually want to set up some kid-safe area, they don't actually want to do anything themselves, they are fighting to make the do something. They don't want to solve their problem, they want the government to solve it for them. And their "problem" isn't that they don't like what they are accessing on the internet, their problem is that they don't like what other people can find on the internet. They don't want something fixed for themselves, they are crusaders who want to forcibly impose their "help" upon everyone else. They are fanatically "helpful" people who want to run around forcibly applying leaches to everyone in order to prevent fictional diseases.

I say a bad idea such as a .kids domain might be a useful idea if it gives these destructively-helpful people the illusion that they are successfully helping their intended victims.... err I mean helping their intended beneficiaries.

Now I admit that it may lead to a problem with these people making demands that schools and libraries have some sort of mandatory filter restricted to the .kids domain. And yes, I acknowledge that some children (and adults) may become victims of that sort of idiocy. However I believe that attempting to impose that sort of filter would be completely unworkable and it would be an almost instantaneous blatant failure. I believe it would result in far less harm than their current efforts to impose upon students some ideological-candyland version of the full internet.

Hell, in an ideal world I would fully support a .xxx domain. In theory it's a great idea. Let porn sites or anyone else grab a .xxx domain if they like, cool. The only reason I don't support it is because in the real world idiots view .xxx as some sort of "fix" for their "problem", and then they obviously expect that "fix" to actually work for solving their problem. They expect "bad" stuff is supposed to be in the .xxx domain, and only within the .xxx domain. So they expect laws to make that true, they expect laws to force things to actually work the way they want and expect them to work. They start demanding stupid destructive and unworkable laws to imprison anyone who puts "objectionable" material on a normal general website. And then all of the problems you list in your post become a catastrophic plague upon the internet itself.

The only problem with your post is that you offered a reasonable rational solution. You often can't fix an unreasonable irrational fanatical people-problem with a reasonable rational fix.

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