kids.us

» see kids.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002 was signed on 4 December 2002, becoming Public Law 107-317. It instructed the Commerce Department to carve a second-level domain out of the American country code and run it as a place where everything was suitable for children under thirteen. NeuStar, which already administered the .us registry, got the job. A sunrise period for trademark holders ran from 17 June to 15 August 2003, general registration opened on 4 September, and the Smithsonian put up the first working site four days later.

The rules were the product. Content had to be reviewed before a site could go live and monitored afterward. Chat and any other two-way messaging were barred unless they could be certified as safe. Most distinctively, no page inside kids.us was permitted to link to anything outside kids.us, which meant the zone was sealed rather than filtered. A name cost around $100 a year, and running an actual site on it cost $250 a year more in content-management fees.

Demand looked real for about an hour. NeuStar took more than 400 registrations in the first sixty minutes, and by May 2004 the NTIA was telling Congress that over 1,700 names had been registered in eight months. The number that mattered was the other one in the same testimony: thirteen live websites.

This was an American law building an American namespace, and being online elsewhere in 2003 brought you no closer to it. The Turkish internet I was using then had its own arguments about what children should be able to reach, and none of them involved a domain where the links were not allowed to point anywhere else.

~ the case file ~

~ twenty-three websites ~

The peak is documented precisely because the people who ran it had to write it down when they asked permission to shut it off. Utilization topped out in 2004 at 1,505 registered names and twenty-three working websites. Around eighty of the names were reserved by federal agencies, which is to say the government was a large fraction of its own namespace's population.

The decline is recorded in the same letter. By 2011 there were 651 registrations and six live sites, and the entire zone attracted 470 unique visitors in a year. The letter adds one more detail, which is that every one of those six sites maintained a bigger presence somewhere else on the open web.

~ who actually moved in ~

The respectable tenants were exactly who you would guess. Nickelodeon opened nick.kids.us and nickjr.kids.us on 14 July 2004, and the Smithsonian had been first through the door the previous September. Most of the rest were federal and state agencies, from the Library of Congress down to individual state governments. By 2011 the six survivors were Nick, Nick Jr., PBS Kids, the Smithsonian and two storefronts selling trampolines, both run by the same company and differing only in whether the word was plural.

The archived record of the zone is stranger than the official count suggests. Of the 195 distinct kids.us hostnames the Internet Archive ever captured, thirty-one are Walmart variants, and they are not all brand protection in the ordinary sense. Alongside walmart and sams-club and the house brands sit defensive registrations spelling out the company's worst press, child labor and all, parked inside the federal government's children's domain so that nobody else could put them there.

~ what the contract ordered ~

Nobody held a press conference, and nothing was announced. On 27 June 2012 a contracting officer signed modification 0012 to NeuStar's usTLD contract, a Standard Form 30 with a modification amount of $0.00, and the purpose field reads: to suspend the kids.us domain. The text says the NTIA has determined the domain is not serving its intended purpose as per the Dot Kids Act, and that suspension takes effect thirty days from the amendment. That is 27 July 2012.

The same document ordered the gravestone. Clause 3 requires NeuStar to modify the kids.us homepage to explain the suspension, and specifies that the page remain available for the life of the contract. That page is live today under a different registry operator, still saying the space was indefinitely suspended effective July 27, 2012, with a link to the very contract modification that did it. Clause 8 gave the registry a year to pull every kids.us name out of the zone, which is why nick.kids.us and smithsonian.kids.us now resolve to nothing.

The legal status is suspension rather than termination, and that is not a technicality. The framework was built by statute, so only Congress can repeal it, and in 2015 the stakeholder council recommended that the suspension simply be made permanent for the life of the registry contract. The law that created the safest corner of the internet is still on the books. The corner has been empty since 2013.

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