By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Friday, November 15, 2002; 9:43 AM
Congress early this morning approved legislation designed to seal off
a G-rated "neighborhood" for kids on the World Wide Web.
The Senate and the House of Representatives passed a final version of
the Dot-Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act, which calls for the
creation of a dot-kids domain within America's dot-us addressing
space.
The bill now awaits White House approval. Administration officials
were not immediately available for comment.
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who co-sponsored the bill in the Senate,
said a dot-us domain would provide a "step forward for parents."
"Everyone who's a parent appreciates the difficulty of supervising
their children on the Internet. This is a tool for parents," Dorgan
said. "We're not censoring anything. We're just going to try to
provide a domain that's safe for children."
The Senate altered the House language after NeuStar Inc., the company
that would be responsible for operating dot-kids, said that running
the domain could cost too much money and effort.
The new language would grant NeuStar an extra two years on its
four-year contract to operate dot-us if it upholds its dot-kids
obligations. The legislation also would allow NeuStar to throw its hat
into the ring when the government re-bids the dot-us contract.
The changes represent a potentially lucrative set of extensions for
NeuStar if it abides by its contractual obligations. NeuStar's primary
responsibility is to police the new domain, ensuring that Web sites
bearing kids.us addresses abide by the child-friendly standards
established by Congress.
"We think this has created a more fair approach to the kids.us space.
It's definitely legislation we think we can work with," NeuStar
Director of Business Development James Casey said.
NeuStar holds the government contract to run dot-us. Like dot-uk in
England and dot-jp in Japan, dot-us is America's sovereign Internet
domain, existing alongside dot-com, dot-net and dot-org in the
Internet's global addressing system.
Because of the Internet's hierarchical nature, domain name owners can
easily use their addresses as "second-level" Internet domains. Since
the U.S. government has reserved the address kids.us, it can assign
a virtually infinite number of names within that address (for example,
address.kids.us, playground.kids.us, school.kids.us, etc.).
The dot-kids legislation represents a step back from an earlier
proposal calling for the creation of a stand-alone dot-kids suffix to
be included alongside dot-com, dot-net and dot-org in the Internet's
Domain Name System (DNS).
The U.S. Commerce Department and the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- the entities that share responsibility
for the DNS -- criticized that proposal, prompting the proposed
compromise.
The bill now says that Web site with a kids.us address cannot post
hyperlinks to locations outside of the kids.us domain. It also
prohibits chat and instant messaging features, except in cases where a
site operator can guarantee the features adhere to kid-friendly
standards developed for the domain.
