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 Is there a market for .kids?
posted by michael on Monday August 06 2001, @01:02AM
Anonymous writes "Against all the hullaballoo about a .kids TLD and the possible requirement for a "kid-friendly" TLD by the United States Congress, Apple Computer's decision to discontinue its "KidSafe" service is interesting. The Apple service worked much the way a .kids TLD supposedly would."
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Apple used teachers across the country to create a "whitelist" of kid-friendly URLs, and parents could use settings in the Apple OS to "lock" a child's Internet experience to the whitelisted URLs. A press release from January, 2000, when Apple announced the service, provides more details:
KidSafe, a breakthrough way to protect our kids on the Internet. KidSafe specifies what kids can see, rather than trying to filter out what they shouldn’t see. KidSafe downloads a software module into the computer’s operating system, which then verifies that each requested web destination is KidSafe by checking with Apple’s KidSafe server. Apple’s server contains over 50,000 KidSafe sites, with over 10,000 new sites being added per month. All KidSafe sites are approved by certified teachers and librarians. KidSafe can also disable Internet email, chat sites and games.
The Apple "KidSafe" service seemed to be everything that the authors of the new .kids legislation could have wanted for the protection of children. The check against the Apple KidSafe server is not that different that checking against a TLD server for a .kids web address. So why is Apple walking away?
"Low customer usage." That's right. No one was using the service.
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