Kid’s Cyberland Coming

“kids.us” domain coming in September:

Children will soon have an Internet neighborhood of their own, designed to be free of pornography, hate speech, gambling, discount tobacco sales and other content deemed inappropriate for young audiences.

….Starting in September, Web site operators who want to run sites for children will be able to buy special “kids.us” addresses carved out within the United States’s existing dot-us domain, such as washingtonpost.kids.us.

Before they can establish a dot-kids Web site, buyers will have to show that their content follows rigid guidelines. They’ll also be barred from linking to sites outside of kids.us, and will have to obey a federal law that requires them to get parental consent before asking children under 13 years old for personal information.

Washington, D.C.-based NeuStar Inc., which owns the government contract to operate dot-us, plans to use a combination of technology and human supervision to patrol the kids.us space. The company has enlisted Arlington, Va.-based Cyveillance to perform routine scans of kids.us addresses using its “spidering” technology. Cyveillance will flag questionable material and send it to NeuStar for review. Depending on how badly the material violates the rules, NeuStar either will shut down the offending site immediately or give operators a few hours to remove the material on their own.

….NeuStar hopes that the high price of kids-us domain names will make them less likely to be abused. To foot the bill for site surveillance, NeuStar will charge an annual $250 content review fee for each kids.us address. The company also has set the wholesale price of a kids.us domain at $65 a year, more than 10 times the $6 wholesale cost of a dot-com address.

Operators who have their sites taken down for content violations will have to pay $400 to get back online. [Washington Post]

It will be nice to have a place for kids to go – the “no links outside kidsland” rule is key.