News for the Week of June 5, 2005

This was a big week for kid-tech news, with three important stories...

Dot-xxx domain approved.

At first glance, it's good and bad news for online kids, from a parent's perspective. On one hand, they'll be able to find smut more easily, on the other it's easier to restrict them from a defined adult-only area. But ultimately, it's another tool in parents' child-protection toolbox. I'm referring to the news that, after years of discussion, ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers, the international body that oversees the Net's addressing system (including .com, .org, etc.) - approved ".xxx." "Sexually explicit sites will be encouraged to move to the new domains to make it easier for people to filter and avoid them," the BBC reports. The Toronto-based non-profit International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR) and its ICM Registry will run dot-xxx as "a voluntary adult top-level domain," meaning porn operators don't have to use it, but there will be incentives. The most effective one IFFOR is pushing for is credit-card companies like Visa and MasterCard working with adult-content companies only in the dot-xxx area. Child pornography, which is illegal, will not appear/be accepted in the domain. Here's earlier, more in-depth coverage of this development, long in the works.

Help for file-sharers' parents.

London-based Childnet International this week released a leaflet and companion Web site, "Young People, Music and the Internet: A Guide for Parents about P2P, file-sharing and downloading," the BBC reports. The leaflet, which was printed in eight languages and will be distributed in 19 countries, describes the little-known risks associated with using the global peer-to-peer (P2P) networks - pornography, viruses, spyware, and loss of personal privacy, as well as the legal risk. Here's the site at Childnet (Net Family News contributed to this project). The launch coincided with a lot of digital-music news: a Los Angeles Times story about the benefits of file-sharing to many independent record labels, 125 of which have just started their own trade association, CNET reports; another CNET piece about a new, legal ("instantly gratifying") option in the free-music scene; a new study CNET cites showing that Apple's iTunes is as popular as many P2P networks; and Sweden's crackdown on P2P, with its new law banning file-sharing without the payment of royalties, as The Local reports.

Candid teen-protection campaign.

Many parents have heard that one in five children received a sexual solicitation online in 1998 and '99. It's a figure from a study done for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (and right now being updated) by the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. Meanwhile, the number of US kids online has grown to 87% (or 21 million, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project), so what better time to launch a fresh nationwide ad campaign to alert girls in particular to the risk of online sexual predation (two-thirds of the children surveyed for that original study were girls)? "Created to coincide with the designation by the United States Senate of June as national Internet safety month, the campaign is the second joint effort in two years by the Advertising Council and the center, a nonprofit organization that works with the Justice Department to prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation and to help find missing children," the New York Times reports. The print, radio, and TV campaign, launched this week, is hard-hitting. One of the TV ads "shows a disheveled apartment being searched by police officers, as one of them puts a computer keyboard into a plastic bag. A teenage girl warns in the voiceover, 'Before you start an online relationship with a guy, think about how it could end'." Here's the National Center's press release about the campaign.