That's the trouble though - those friendly neighborhood sites can generally be assumed to be appropriate for kids, but if we create the expectation that they must ensure they are appropriate for certain age brackets simply by virtue of being online, those sites will cease existing.

Instead of running their own websites, they'll migrate to a platform like Facebook. That way Meta handles the burden of moderation and the legal complaints for the inevitable moderation failures.

>A .kids domain is not a useful approach.

I surprisingly seriously disagree, and think you're perhaps missing a lot of the contention in this whole societal debate. The point is to give people workable tools with some level of agreed sane defaults they can make use of, tweak, or ignore entirely, without imposing any burden at all on the existing internet and its adult (or children with parents who wish it) users.

>The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral

First: by who's standards is one of the core questions! What's neutral to one parent may not be to another. You illustrate this with your very first example in fact, "For example my church a web site". There are religious parents (and no doubt atheist ones as well) who would quite strongly not want their young child to visit your church's website.

Second: there is a difference between simply wanting to be child friendly and taking on a legal obligation and liability to be child "safe" to some given standard. Parents would be perfectly free to whitelist whatever additional sites they liked, or to subscribe to lists that curated whitelists of various sorts, or to use other controls. But a politically significant number of parents clearly want assurance that their child will near-never (with actual enforcement mechanisms for failure) encounter something outside of bounds. Meeting that need requires either whitelists or the sort of restrictions that would wreck the current web (and probably still not work very well).

>Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions?

If the parents of said kids want it to, then yes? Why would that be a big deal? I'd be surprised if like most places SO doesn't already have piles of domains purely for defensive purposes, and as something nationally regulated I certainly envision such a domain registrar being dirt cheap (or even free, paid for by tax dollars) for domains. Given the context and that it'd be very much not open to all there isn't any need to worry about cost to dissuade scammers and such, they'd be prevented from ever registering in the first place. Rules around use of trademark, business names and so on could also be very strict.

>If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible to 16yo there needs to be at least kids.uk and kids.au.

Yes? DNS is not expensive. And again, parents don't need to make use of it. This would be for those who do, who are right now pushing for ID for everything. It's a safe default walled garden, but one with doors any parent can open.

>Does OpenSSL.org or OpenSSL.com get to be OpenSSL.kids?

Which one chooses to get accredited by a regulator or child protection organization with insurance and so on first? Why are you asserting either would even bother? Which one would be happy about having to verify ID of users right now?

>Sorry but duplicating the entire neutral internet domain space with yet another tld isn't a helpful approach.

Sorry but you haven't thought about this very clearly at all. This proposal is very explicitly a small subset of the entire neutral internet! Duplication is never something I suggested, rather the very opposite! The "entire neutral internet" is by default adult here, but parents would be able to allow children to browse it just as now. However, some are clearly unhappy with that, enough that we're seeing politicians respond with things that would be very bad.