www.kids: It's About Time

The July issue of National Review contains a great piece by Jonah Goldberg and Nick Schulz, in which they propose the creation of a new "top-level domain" reserved exclusively for material appropriate for children under the age of eighteen: www.kids.

http://article.nationalreview.com/437945/gated-or-x-rated/jonah-goldberg-nick-schulz

Currently there is a growing handful of top-level domains: .com, .gov, .edu, etc . . . . Goldberg and Shulz give a chilling (if you're a parent) account of just how easily a child can be exposed to harmful content on the Internet:

But even on YouTube things are not so safe for children. For example, one of the more infuriating gags is to re-dub the voice tracks on clips from children’s cartoons. A friend of the authors’ once let his very young daughter watch a YouTube clip of Thomas the Tank Engine while he worked at his desk nearby. He had to shut the computer off when one of the characters brought up oral sex. On another occasion, one of the authors tried to play a YouTube clip of the opening song from the old 1980s Transformers cartoon, only to have to pretend there was a technical problem when the profanity started to fly. Even browsing the undoctored content on YouTube, a child is merely a click or two away from something offensive or otherwise ill-suited for kids.

Goldberg and Shulz make the case for a children's domain persuasively. It's likely to draw support from everybody but the "frontier culture voluptuaries," who are always on high alert for any form of encroachment on the Internet's "Wild West" atmoshpere.

"Cyberspace," says Godberg and Shulz, "is a big place, with plenty of room for the Wild West saloon and the gated community." In discussing Apple's successful App Store approach, they relate an exchange between one such voluptuary and Apple CEO Steve Jobs:

By reserving the right to decide what third-party programs can be sold or used on their platforms, Apple has introduced a kind of zoning to the Internet. Ryan Tate, a tech blogger, wrote in a now-famous e-mail exchange with Jobs: “If [Bob]Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution?’ [sic] Revolutions are about freedom.”

. . . Jobs’s reply: “Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery.” And finally: “Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’.”

Tate was horrified. “I don’t want ‘freedom from porn,’” he complained. “Porn is just fine!”

To which Jobs replied, “You might care more about porn when you have kids . . .”