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American government kills off .kids.us

Kevin Murphy, July 13, 2012, 19:41:44 (UTC), Domain Registries

The US government is killing off the failed .kids.us domain, ten years after it was created by Congress.
The decision was explained in a statement posted on www.kids.us:

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

An accompanying document (pdf) from Commerce says that .us registry operator Neustar should stop accepting new registrations and ask registrants to suspend their sites.
All .kids.us domains will be removed from the .us zone by June 27, 2013.
The .kids.us space was created by the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002 and essentially forced on Neustar as a means for some politicians to get some family-friendly fluff on their voting records.
It’s been considered an abject failure ever since, largely due to its strict content regulations and a lack of marketing.
From the Google results and the old .kids.us directory, I’d estimate the number of registrations at fewer than 100.
In the new gTLD program there are two applicants for .kids — Amazon and DotKids Foundation. There’s also an applicant for .kid and an applicant for the Russian “.children”.


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Comments (2)

  1. What does it say about the future of the applied for .kids and Cyrillic .kids (.дети)?

  2. KD says:

    More importantly it shows if you put your home in a questionable TLD – you can be evicted and are at the mercy of the registry operator.

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