 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
H.R. 2417, the Dot Kids Name Act of 2001.
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
Mr. Page Howe
Introduction Mr.
Chairman and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to be here
today. I
am pleased to speak on an issue of vital importance to parents and their
children. More and more, we see parental anxieties and fears about the safety of
the internet. Widespread
concerns exist in the cities and extend out into the country; they are shared
within our nation as well as abroad; they touch parents equipped with extensive
knowledge of technology as well as those just discovering the Internet.
As
founder and Chairman of .KIDS Domains, Inc., I have personally overseen and
funded an initiative to establish .kids as a restricted Top Level Domain
accessible to all Internet users.
I would like to acknowledge and thank Congressman Shimkus, and
Congressman Markey and their staffs for their efforts in sponsoring H.R. 2417,
as well as the staff of this committee.
In addition, I also would like to thank and commend the other
Representatives who have co-sponsored the Bill. I would like to acknowledge the
work done prior to the introduction of this bill, including the sponsoring
Representatives and Senators of the Child Online Protection Act, the
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, the Communications Decency
Act of 1995, as well as the members of the COPA Commission, whose work over 1999
and 2000 has largely gone unnoticed and unimplemented.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge additional groups operating to
educate the public on child safety issues on the internet such as
cyberangels.com, getnetwise.org, the Internet Content Rating Agency (ICRA),
NetMom, and SafeKids; all have made strides in educating the public on how to
best manage children's interaction with the Internet. With
my testimony, I will seek to illuminate for the Committee the need we perceive
exists for .kids and the reasons this solution alone is optimal. To
date, efforts to regulate the internet have had to overcome hurdles of what is
obscene or what is illegal, as well as how to implement those laws within in a
venue, the internet, where many behaviors are legal for adults.
The inherent lack of defined national boundaries on the internet, free
speech issues, and specific legal issues regarding control of existing content
providers have been a barrier to what we believe is the sincere intent of this
committee and the entire Congress to solve this issue. .Kids
is a solution from the private sector, a voluntary space created first and
foremost for kids and the parents of those kids who wish to limit the scope of
their children's access on the internet when they are not present to protect
and guide their child's experience. In addition, we believe .kids will help
libraries and schools to effectively meet the mandates set out to create
publicly available but kid-friendly access to the internet. The
Internet today, One-Size Doesn't Fit All Currently
it's a one-size-fits-all Internet and trusting that the existing ".com"
space and its website operators will deliver content to all audiences does not
work. Websites attempting to reach multiple audiences are too complex,
especially for kids, reducing the relevancy of the content they deliver to
children. In
addition, children are legally unable to enter into contracts, so websites that
desire to register users, have users join mailing lists, acknowledge policies
and rules, sign away rights; or in other words to generally do business on a
"buyer beware" basis, are not appropriate for interaction with kids. A
registry of .kids domain addresses will help those institutions and parents who
want to, and have the right to, make choices for children. In addition, by
educating and building a community of content providers who are delivering
content specifically for children, children are empowered to make their own
choices at the keyboard level. Today's youth will become empowered to seek
out the wonderful educational, entertainment oriented, and communication
experiences the World Wide Web has to offer. Consider
for a moment if some of today's more popular public venues operated without
the benefit of segmentation of content and objects on the basis of age. The
Internet today is like: Movie
theatres offering showings of all movies, even the most vulgar, all day with the
doors open for all to enter or explore, free. Newsstands
and bookstores with racist propaganda mixed in haphazardly next to comic books
and Teen magazines. Casinos
with no age restrictions Sporting
Goods stores with guns and rifles displayed and available at eye level next to
swim fins and basketballs. Grocery
Stores with cigarettes on the candy rack. A
police squad than when it finds a crime, may or may not know the true owner of
the business, and may have no jurisdiction over what is being done or shown. We
are positive on the possibilities and potential of the Internet to educate,
communicate and bring knowledge and entertainment to kids worldwide.
It is a dynamic, low cost media that can deliver to any child the
cumulative knowledge or experience of kids worldwide.
Unfortunately, between the unclear and evolving beginnings of the
internet, the "dot-com" era of the past three years, the absence any
controls whatsoever, and techniques and tactics designed to trap users, the
internet today is made up of companies pursuing dominating, monopolistic,
business models surrounded by abandoned sites and domain names, domain names
without content, websites containing tools to provide revenue, unclear
authority, and generally an environment where even adults who are used to being
on their guard can have trouble navigating through the junk. We
believe parents are most fearful because even a minimum safety level does not
exist. In the debate over .kids and whether certain content is kid-friendly or
appropriate, at least we will have moved the argument to the difference between
G and PG13, not G and X.. And most importantly, sites within the .kids network
cannot simply rely on a claim that the content is meant for adults. .KIDS
is for kids So
what is .kids?
At the DNS level the top level domain acts as the beginning of the
internet's directory system.
For instance, when an internet user types in www.congress.gov,
the first thing their computer does is to query the internet's directory
system to find out what the numeric address of the computer is that is
"hosting" the US Congress website.
In the same way, the .kids initiative will allow only those websites
which have agreed to the Content Guidelines to have .kids domain names that
resolve for internet users.
By the same token, that resolution can be instantly blocked if a website
violates the Guidelines and publishes inappropriate content.
We
don't think it makes sense to unleash kids into the current internet
environment. We
support the creation of a .kids top level domain, a community of website owners
who agree up front to
abide by the clearly defined and delineated "Content Guidelines"
(established by an Independent Content Policy Board) of the .kids network. We
do not propose to restrict any content on the .com, .net and .org developed
public spaces.
When we say .kids is a restricted domain name, we mean it is restricted
to those registrants and a community of website owners who themselves have
agreed: To
operate kid-friendly websites, To
have their websites in a safe and monitored "greenspace", To
enter into a binding agreement with the registry outlining the registrant's
acknowledgement of the Content Guidelines and Terms of Use, To
supporting a systematic protocol for swift attention to those sites and URLs
which may be in violation of the Content Guidelines, To
an Annual Auditing Process and reeducation each year of the laws, regulations,
and guidelines regarding kids, To
the education of registrants, users, and the Internet Community at large on
child safety and protection issues on the Internet, And,
to an emphasis on providing child safety, children's infrastructure, and child
empowerment non-profit organizations with meaningful charitable funding. Parents
and kids can then trust that a domain name owner and registrant are accountable,
and websites and content within the .kids network are kid-friendly. Parents
always have the choice of letting their kids browse the whole internet and
Congress will still need to fight to possibly reign in the excesses of the .com
world. So
why are we here? We
are here because we can and have created this .kids community, but we can't
get access to the one and only directory of website addresses administered by
ICANN. We
did try however. In
November of last year we submitted a comprehensive application to ICANN, along
with $50,000, as part of the TLD selection process. Our application to ICANN was
the only application for a .kids TLD which met ICANN's "Threshold"
requirements, and the only one which proposes a restricted sponsored name space. Today,
a full year later, ICANN continues to wrestle with the implementation of the TLD
process. As
was discussed earlier this year in this committee and others, the ICANN
application process originally envisioned a formal application, in person
interviews, a board decision process and implementation by January of 2001. In
our case, our proposal for .kids was thrown in with others who wanted the name
.kids, but who offered no controls over any of the content.
It was even included in the same category with .xxx, - an adult only
proposal which also wanted to administer a .kids.
I have not been asked to give my testimony about the ICANN application
process or about the role of ICANN in general, and so I will simply characterize
our experience of the TLD application process as frustrating and disappointing. We
believe introducing .kids would go a long way in showing what can be done by
opening up the A Root to new TLDs which are not simply duplicates of .com (which
creates more confusion), but are intelligent choices for the segmentation of the
DNS. Since
the time of the initially scheduled hearing, the Bill has been amended
significantly and now concerns the allocation of the second level domain,
kids.us. To
the degree to which kids.us is the end result of attempts by the legislature to
create a safe haven on the Internet for children, .KIDS Domains intends to
actively pursue becoming the registry operator for kids.us . We
believe a .kids TLD can effectively create a positive, relevant, engaging, and
safe "greenspace" on the Internet for kids. In addition, creating a .kids
space will increase the potential effectiveness of existing filtering and
child-safety software tools. The only barrier to the operation of such a
safe-haven for children is an action by an authority so empowered that would
change the root zone to allow for the inclusion of a .kids. Conclusion COPA,
the Commission on Online Child Protection, has studied a wide range of
child-protective technologies and methods. They concluded that a
"greenspace" (a restricted .kids) would be most effective in reducing access
to obscene material while maintaining accessibility and minimizing adverse
effects. The
only negative that the Commission outlined regarding a .kids extension was that
one did not yet exist. Thank you for your interest in .kids, for your efforts surrounding this bill, and for the opportunity to address this committee today. I would be pleased to answer any of your questions.
|
|||||||||||
|
