|
R.I.P.
Kids.us.
The
rarely used extension that was created by an Act
of Congress in 2003 with the idea
of providing a safe place for kids on the
web is suspending operations effective July
27, 2012 (the domains sold were
actually sub-domains of kids.us, for
example toys.kids.us). The official
announcement,
|
|
|
While
Kids.us was launched with good intentions most
domain pros believe it was doomed from
the start by exceptionally high registration
fees (around $250 if I recall correctly),
plus content management fees and
extremely strict rules governing content and
banning outbound links on kids.us sites. It is
believed the total number of kids.us
registrations were in the low three figures
at best. In
their announcement the NTIA cited different
reasons for the closure, blaming it on a multitude
of new options for kids that arrived
over the past decade, leaving the
extension no longer viable (though
plainly potential developers never considered it
to be viable in the first place given the
expense and red tape that choked the
extension).
|
|
Image
from Bigstock |
The
NTIA statement said, "Today,
there are hundreds, if not thousands, of
sites containing high quality content
aimed at children under the age of 13.
Additionally, parents have a multitude
of tools at their disposal including,
software applications, web browsers, and
parental control features from their
Internet Service Providers, hosting
providers and third party applications,
to help keep their children safe
on-line.
As
a result of the changed landscape of
the Internet and the many other tools
that parents now have available to them
to protect their children's online
experience, effective July 27, 2012, the
Department of Commerce suspended the
kids.us If you are a registrant or
holder of a kids.us name, please contact
your registrar for further information
about the suspension of this domain. You
can also find additional information
about the suspension at http://www.ntia.doc.gov."
One
kids.us registrar, Encirca.com, |
|
provided
more
information for their
kids.us registrants today, saying "EnCirca has immediately
suspended the registration and renewal of all kids.us domain
names. If you have content
on your kids.us domain
names, please remove all
such content from their sites by no
later than September 30, 2012.
Although for the past several years, Neustar
(operator of the .US registry) has
waived the content management fee to
encourage the proliferation of kids.us
website, if content is not removed from
the websites by that date, Neustar
reserves the right to charge each domain
name registrant a content management
fee on a pro-rated bases starting
from October 1st, 2012.
By July 27, 2013, Neustar is
required to remove all kids.us domain
name registrations from the .us zone
regardless of the registration
expiration date." |
The death of a
domain extension is something we have rarely witnessed.
It is obviously a messy spectacle but one
that is likely to be played out more often with
ICANN planning to roll out hundreds
of new TLDs starting next year.
|
