Safety Patrol Readied For Dot-Kids
from the there-own-little-internet dept
NeuStar is getting ready to launch their special walled garden "internet-for-kids" in the near future, but some are wondering how they're going to be able to keep the "kids-only" section of the internet safe. The company says they have a variety of systems in place to do so. Anyone posting material to a .kids.us site needs to first get it approved. Then, the site will use technology scrapers and human monitors to continually check that all the content is "safe". Sites within .kids.us can only link to other sites within .kids.us and need to pretend that's the only internet that exists. Many are predicting that NeuStar has quite a job ahead of it. All this monitoring certainly takes away from the benefits of the internet, and people expect that "bad stuff" will sneak through. "Sooner or later the nipples are going to start falling through the cracks," says one person in the article, while another points out: "There is no automated way to differentiate between a glazed doughnut and a suntanned breast." However, the bigger question may be, if they build a corner of the internet just for kids... will anyone actually show up? While it may sound like a good thing for parents, they will suffer from the "empty-room" problem. No one is going to set up such a site if there aren't visitors, and whose going to visit if there's no content?
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