Governments are ruining the internet to protect kids but there is a much better way - Neowin

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Over the last couple of years, we have seen governments in Australia, the UK, and beyond implementing stringent child-safety laws such as bans for under-16s on social media and complex age checks for people trying to access porn websites to prevent kids from getting access.

While all of these measures are well meaning, they are big risks to the open internet, quite dystopian in nature, and are generally too heavy-handed. They create a headache and security risk for adults who have to verify their age with sensitive documents and push children to unregulated corners of the internet and sketchy VPNs - or fake moustaches - just to bypass the restrictions.

The opposing view to all this age verification stuff is to say it’s the parents responsibility to protect their children; but let’s be real, many parents don’t possess the technical knowledge of how to block access to adult websites or monitor what their children are doing on their phones and computers.

In this editorial I will expound on what I think to be the best solution, namely, ISPs being required by law to ship routers to customers with a family DNS pre-configured. Candidate family DNS services that I am thinking of include Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.3 and CleanBrowsing’s Family Filter - this is not an exhaustive list, but two popular ones that exist. I believe that this solution would help to offer a baseline level of protection for families, remove the risk of too much data collection by governments, and leave adults free to adjust their DNS settings if they want unrestricted access to the internet.

Credit: Zulfugar Karimov (Unsplash)

I think that part of the reason we have got the solution we have now - heavy-handedness from governments - is because they are obsessed with trying to prevent determined teenagers from hunting for adult content. Even with all the measures they are taking, these teens are still finding ways around the block. More importantly, it misses the fact that a lot of childhood exposure to explicit content is completely accidental via bad search engine autocompletes, typosquatting (malicious sites buying domains one letter off from popular kids’ brands), and malicious ad-network redirects from seemingly innocent gaming or streaming websites.

Accidental exposure to extreme content can be harmful to young kids that are not seeking it out and if it is adult material they come across, then it could be the start of future consumption, moving from accidental exposure to actively seeking it out.

The solutions proposed now, such as age-gates on websites do nothing to stop an accidental redirect or a malicious script from putting explicit content on the page a child is browsing. A filter that is blocking malicious pages and adult sites outright, on the other hand, could help to prevent these accidents.

As a bit of background to how DNS works, you can think of it like a phonebook for the internet. You type in your easy to remember URL, such as Google.com and then the DNS matches this with the IP address, to which your browser requests the page from and its then displayed in your browser. The family filtering DNS services are a bit different because they recognize if a domain contains adult material and will then refuse to resolve the IP address, preventing access while connected to that router.

By filtering at the router level, parents would quickly be able to protect all devices connected via the network, whether that be an iPhone, an Android tablet, a smart TV, a computer, or a game console. Also, unlike clunky parent control apps that can slow down devices, the DNS resolution happens in milliseconds at the packet level so you would never know it is there.

Photo by Yan Krukau (Pexels)

People who disagree with the heavy-handed government safety measures, such as the UK’s Online Safety Act, often say that protecting kids should be the responsibility of the parents. But if we are being real about it, there are plenty of reasons this is not feasible. Many parents are working multiple jobs and don’t have the time to sit around fighting with their gadget to turn on a family filter, others are not tech-savvy, and others don’t know how to login to their router and change the settings.

By shipping routers with family filtering on by default, the script gets completely flipped, parents wouldn’t need to worry about kids stumbling on adult content, because it is largely going to be blocked. As many of these DNS services are free, it also means that parents don’t have to pay monthly subscriptions like they do now for some parental control apps. It also removes the need to configure software or research software.

Photo by Stefan Coders (Pexels)

The heavy-handed approaches governments are taking to...