Let’s build a community internet for kids

A growing number of people seem to agree that the internet is bad for children – allegedly addictive, damaging to self-esteem, perhaps a portal to predators. In the past year, several countries have begun requiring stricter age verification or outright bans on minors. In late June in the US, the House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, the latest in a series of pilot child online safety laws. A few days later, a Pew Research Center poll found that more than half of American respondents favor banning social media for anyone under the age of 16. There is a growing sense that the digital world is a public health issue as well something – no matter how extreme – it has to be done.

But while politicians are chasing elaborate and questionable ways to keep kids away from the worst of the internet, another option is to look them in the face: Use money to make it better. And, luckily, I have an idea: Tax the big tech companies, and give that money to build what we should call a public internet for kids.

First of all, what is something public internet for children? I’m not proposing a completely different service like France’s national proto-internet Minitel, but something like the “public lane on the information highway” that writer Ben Tarnoff proposed The Internet of People – or, apparently, pushing television for 20th-century children’s society. The goal will be to fund new or existing online services that meet two criteria: They primarily serve children, and they are not for profit. Besides, the options are many. Few recipients of the grant:

These services can be new or existing, led by institutions or individuals, developed and maintained by children or adults, and accessible by small groups and anyone online. The ultimate goal would be something that almost everyone agrees is beneficial: cutting the profit motive out of the online lives of children and teenagers.

Almost every popular criticism of social media is, in one way or another, about its anti-economic motives. Critics warn of allegedly dangerous “dark patterns” that allow companies to connect users and grow endlessly, or aggressive advertising based on even more aggressive data collection, or moderation teams that operate at the lowest possible rate. Whatever human complaint is accurate, years of leaks and court filings show that companies are constantly balancing the welfare of users with the need to negotiate and profit – an increasing stress as they transfer resources to AI.

Even well-intentioned, community-building resources exist in this ecosystem. Parenting networks are linked to Facebook and other increasingly social media platforms or to private sites that must support themselves with frequent intrusive ads.

Many people think of ways to create a dysfunctional Internet, but at the policy level, we have seen two proposed solutions: to punish companies until they change the basic aspects of their business models, or to kick anyone of vulnerable age offline. The entire popular internet regulation field is built on taking things away from people — removing adults’ ability to interact with the internet on their own terms, while removing children’s access to public and creative spaces with nothing in return.

So far, the evidence suggests that this so-called “common sense” solution is difficult to implement and highly flawed. Australia implemented a blanket ban on youth social media use last year, but it appears to be largely ineffective, with one study suggesting that more than 80 percent of children retain access. Aging systems are simultaneously obtrusive and privacy-depriving. The US faces its own set of very specific problems. The complete lack of modern data privacy laws compound the security risks of collecting age verification information. Members of Congress have questioned whether the Trump administration is too corrupt to (or, considering federal agencies, able to) enforce Internet laws openly and honestly.

The children’s public Internet takes on the same problem from another angle. Rather than forcefully strangle the existing online ecosystem, it will grow it in new and better ways. And yes, I mean it better honestlynot only from a moral point of view but also from a practical point of view. There’s never been a better time for a public alternative to private technology. Small, non-profit services may be smaller and more complex than commercial ones, but they won’t be drowned out by ads, microtransactions, AI boondoggles, and other signs of an industry that doesn’t care if people like its products.

Will some kids stick to Instagram and TikTok, or find the idea of ​​an internet “kids thing” uncool? Of course. But there is the eternal appeal of finding a new club that your parents can’t join. (Undoubtedly, many kids are already trying this on private services like Discord, which are hampered by aging and plagued by brutal monetization and AI tools that young people generally hate.) And anyway, how good or “adult” is the mass of social networks where people are afraid to “kill” and “gay”?

Internet legal expert Eric Goldman – who wrote the 2025 academic paper outlining the problems with existing child safety proposals – points out that there it was an early effort to make the internet for kids: the world’s top internet site for kids.us. That domain was little used and eventually abandoned. But it’s an early example of people realizing that youth-oriented spaces are important, an idea that makes more sense these days, when the Internet is central to almost everyone’s lives – it takes more than a designated web address to succeed.

Some may argue that young people simply need an offline, period, screen time switch to get a touch of the good old fashioned grass. I’m not immune to this trend — I’m the parent of a toddler who discovered YouTube. But even before the fury of the covid-19 pandemic, many children’s offline worlds were oppressive. Rebuilding these virtual spaces is important, but giving people an online alternative to Big Tech is more constructive (and, it seems, really accessible) than sending them staring at the wall.

In fact, some Big Tech posts already they exist to grab the attention of children, they tend to be worse – places like 4chan and Telegram groups are sketchy. These services are happy to bypass age restrictions and other restrictions on children’s access while giving older predators free rein.

And while the program will benefit children immediately, the goal will be to model a better Internet for everyone. Open source software can also be aimed at all ages, public websites can be useful for adults as well as children, and any effective service can be targeted at adults. Similar to municipal broadband owned by the city, and close to the social technology organization Tarnoff called digital sewer socialism, it can provide much-needed competition that pushes technology companies to provide better service. Meanwhile, even these companies may see a name tax as better than tougher laws and as an opportunity for good PR.

It’s true, there’s a lot of practical information to unpack. You may need to deal with additional requirements: a ban on commercial work by users (such as the case of the non-profit fiction forum Our Archive), perhaps, and a requirement that any software be open source. There is the issue of determining which government agency will oversee the program, what type of companies will be taxed, who will evaluate the grants, and how they will be evaluated for efficiency, for example.

But most of the obvious objections seem to be special. One recipient of a government grant or another will almost certainly have a major failure of security or moderation, but probably with less damage than their commercial counterparts. The program will be a lightning rod for complaints about government efficiency and culture war topics, but also cancer vaccines. When it seems like nothing is working, why not swing the fence and try something new?

The US government helped create the Internet – and for all the wrongs of the digital world, it’s a broken place that needs to be fixed. It’s time for the government to help recreate it, too.