Protecting kids online should have a market driven solution

As some may know, the Department for Children, Schools and Families has launched a review of technology and children as part of it's 10 year Children's Plan. Now, putting aside the eerily Soviet overtones of Ten Year Plans, there is quite a simple answer to protecting children online, and it lies in the market between parents (consumers) and the industry.

Content Service Providers (not Internet Service Providers) have existed for many years already. AOL being the most obvious which has pretty strict parental controls implemented into its AOL client based on login details and profiles. However, the biggest problem, now that we are in the age of router connections in homes rather than modems, is that a child can quite easily choose to use another browser and circumvent many parental controls.

This is where the industry and a little innovation comes in. What needs to happen is for a company to offer a service that takes the same technology principle of the "walled garden" that exist in AOL's parental controls, and produce an embedded system that has a browser, email and other basic Internet capabilities, but which can only ever connect tothe Internet through the walled garden.

The way to protect kids online is to not let them go online in any real sense. Allow them to connect to a service that provides content and routes to very specific targeted content, but no more. Client side software with a kitemark - as the Government is proposing, -will never be as good as network based restriction on where you can actually get too.

You don't need legislation to achieve this, you just need an entrepreneur, or already existing ISP, to market a hardware product that allows very limited network access to a walled garden. The mobile phone companies already do it with their services, it's just a matter of time before someone does it with more powerful equipment.