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Kids' Browsers: To Block or not to Block?

What's All the hype?

Welcome to another chapter in the browser wars -- and this time, I don't mean IE vs. Netscape vs. whomever. Rather, the struggle of free speech vs. censorship taking place in the battlefield of children's browsers and blocking software.

I started reflecting on kids' browsers and related software recently as I watched my 5-year-old surf his latest favorite site on my computer, Lego.com. I got to thinking that if he missed one letter, www.lego.com could become www.legs.com, and there's probably not a lot of good youth-oriented content down that road.

Of course, I was aware that there are a lot of options for helping to monitor and control my child's use of the Internet, but I had never really thought too much about the issues and ramifications of using such censoring software.

Now, I like to think I believe in free speech as much as the next guy, but I can really see both sides of this issue. As a father who won't always be around when my children are using the Internet on our home PCs, a part of me wants the power to censor. I don't feel good about it, though.

As I sat down to research the topic, it was comforting to find that there are so many companies and products willing to help me control my children's surfing experience. There are more children's-oriented browsers available than their adult counterparts, and when you add on all of the kids' search engines, and blocking and filtering products out there, you begin to get the sense that this is a bustling segment of the industry.

As I mentioned, my son is just 5 and at that age he's not going to be using computers without adult supervision (at least in our house). I made the mistake of showing him the delete key early on and now live in fear that my latest work will fall prey to the 5-year-old ax, so I'm usually pretty aware when he's sitting at my machine.

But it won't be long before he will be able to come into the study, fire up a computer and go off exploring in cyberspace all on his own, and it's never too early to start figuring out how best to handle it. After all, I volunteered for the tech committee at his elementary school, I should certainly know about this stuff!

So, I spent an afternoon downloading a bunch of kids' browsers and blocking programs, hoping I could get a better idea of what I was dealing with. I also read up on the issues surrounding kids' browsers and software designed to limit children's exposure, or "censorware" as it is dubbed by the Peacefire.org group. More on those spunky kids later.

I downloaded trial versions of programs like SurfControl, WebKids, Bounce, Cybersitter, and SurfMonkey and put them through some paces. I found it quite easy to bring up clearly adult content in almost all cases, though perhaps this says more about how long I've been poking around the dark corners of the Net than anything else. Bounce was the one program that seemed a bit better than the others at screening out adult content.

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