At 02:53 PM 8/11/00 -0700, Greg Skinner wrote:
I have heard on some local (SF bay area) technology news reports that
the Commission on Online Child Protection is looking at dividing the
IPv6 address space into regions that can be classified according to
their "safety" for child access.
I wouldn't worry excessively about that. This is roughly comparable to the
argument that there should be a DNS TLD ".kids" in which folks who have a
non-porn web site can get a domain name. Best.com is now part of Verio,
which is in turn becoming part of NTT. All of these are non-porn companies.
Is that their most important aspect, one they are going to base their
domain name one? nay, nay...
You are assuming that they will not acquire another domain name in one
of these protected zones (e.g. best.kids). I don't think the idea is
all that farfetched, particularly if they can find some business
reason to do so. If branding some of their content (or customers'
content) under .kids makes business sense, they'll do it.
Addresses will be assigned by address registries to service providers, and
in turn to subscribers to service providers. The commission presumably has
some valid comment on what content should be accessible by children, but it
has no idea whether or how that relates to the business structure of the
Internet, and therefore to IPv6 addressing.
Leaving aside my opinions on how technically sound the idea is, there
is certainly precedent for restricting certain types of domain name or
IP address space. Members of the commission are certainly aware of
this. If they can get enough support for their proposals, and enough
of the Internet community goes along with them, they can pull it off,
in my opinion.
--gregbo