An increasing number of people seem to agree the internet is terrible for children — allegedly addictive, destructive to self-esteem, possibly a portal to predators. Over the past year, several countries have started requiring stringent age verification or outright bans for minors. At the end of June in the US, the House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, the latest in a string of attempted online child safety regulations. A couple of days later, a Pew Research Center survey found over half of US respondents favored a ban on social media for anyone under 16. There’s a growing sense that the digital world is a public health crisis and something — no matter how extreme — must be done.
But while politicians chase elaborate and questionable methods of keeping kids away from the worst of the internet, another option is staring them in the face: Spend money to make it better. And, fortunately, I’ve got an idea: Levy a tax on major tech companies, and hand out that money for the construction of what we should call a children’s public internet.
First of all, what is a children’s public internet? I’m not suggesting an entirely separate service like France’s national proto-internet Minitel, but something more like the “public lane in the information superhighway” that author Ben Tarnoff proposed in Internet for the People — or, more tangibly, the 20th-century push for children’s public television. The goal would be to fund new or existing online services that meet two criteria: They primarily serve children, and they don’t operate for profit. Beyond that, the options are myriad. A few hypothetical grant recipients:
- A library-run, community-moderated Mastodon instance for young users
- An open-source, non-monetized version of Roblox
- A website that offers ad-free, child- or teen-appropriate news and educational content
- A protocol for reverse age verification — working with school systems or government agencies to verify users of a child-focused site are minors, while minimizing (to the extent it’s possible) privacy and security risks
- A local newsletter or web portal that promotes nearby in-person family activities
- A group of volunteer moderators for a children’s crafts forum
These services could be new or existing, led by institutions or individuals, developed and maintained by minors or adults, and accessible by small groups or anybody on the internet. The primary goal would be something almost everyone agrees is beneficial: cutting the profit motive out of kids’ and teenagers’ online lives.
Nearly every popular criticism of social media is, in some way, about its perverse economic incentives. Critics warn of allegedly predatory “dark patterns” that allow companies to hook users and scale endlessly, or invasive advertising based on even more invasive data collection, or moderation teams operated at the lowest feasible cost. However accurate any individual complaint is, years of leaks and court filings demonstrate that companies are constantly balancing user well-being with the need for engagement and profit — a stressor that’s only increasing as they divert resources toward AI.
Even well-meaning, socially constructive services exist in this ecosystem. Parenting networks are funneled onto Facebook and other platforms that are increasingly hostile to human connection or onto private sites that must support themselves with often-intrusive ads.
Plenty of people are theorizing ways to build a less vampiric internet, but at the policy level, we’ve seen basically two proposed solutions: punish companies until they change fundamental elements of their business models, or kick anybody of a vulnerable age offline. The entire field of popular internet regulation is built on taking things away from people — removing adults’ ability to engage with the internet on their own terms, while removing kids’ access to social and creative spaces while offering nothing in return.
So far, evidence suggests this supposedly “common-sense” solution is difficult to implement and deeply flawed. Australia implemented a blanket ban on teen social media use last year, but it appears to be largely ineffectual, with one study suggesting over 80 percent of kids maintain access. Age-gating systems remain simultaneously circumventable and deleterious to privacy. The US faces its own highly specific set of problems. A near-total lack of modern data privacy laws compounds the security risks of collecting age verification info. Members of Congress have questioned whether the deeply corrupt Trump administration will (or, given its gutting of federal agencies, even can) enforce internet regulations evenhandedly and in good faith.
A children’s public internet takes on the same basic problem from the opposite direction. Instead of forcibly constricting the existing online ecosystem, it would expand it with new and better alternatives. And yes, I mean objectively better, not just from a moral standpoint but a functional one. There’s never been a more opportune time for a public alternative to private tech. Small, nonprofit services can be smaller and rougher-edged than commercial ones, but they won’t be choked with ads, microtransactions, AI boondoggles, and other symptoms of an industry that simply doesn’t care if people like its products anymore.
Will some minors stick with Instagram and TikTok, or find the idea of a “kid stuff” internet uncool? Sure. But there’s a perennial appeal to discovering a new club that your parents can’t join. (Anecdotally, many kids are already attempting this on semi-private services like Discord, hampered by age-gating and beset by aggressive monetization and AI tools that young people in general hate.) And anyway, how cool or “adult” are a bunch of social networks where people are scared to say “kill” and “lesbian”?
Finally, a social network your parents can’t join
Internet law expert Eric Goldman — who authored a 2025 academic paper outlining the problems with existing child safety proposals — points out that there was an early attempt to make an internet for kids: the kids.us internet top-level domain. That domain was little-used and ultimately abandoned. But it’s an early example of people recognizing that youth-focused online spaces matter, a concept that makes far more sense these days, when the internet is central to virtually everyone’s lives — it just needs more than a bespoke web address to thrive.
Some might argue that young people simply need to get offline, period, swapping screentime for good old-fashioned grass touching. I’m not immune to this impulse — I’m a parent of a toddler who’s discovered YouTube. But even before the drastic upset of the covid-19 pandemic, many children’s offline worlds were constricting. Rebuilding these physical spaces is vital, but giving people an online alternative to Big Tech is more constructive (and, it sure seems, practically achievable) than sending them to stare at a wall.
In fact, alternative spaces to Big Tech already exist to capture kids’ attention, they’re just often even worse — places like 4chan and sketchy Telegram groups. These services are happy to flout age-gating laws and other restrictions on kids’ access while giving adult predators free rein.
And while this program would most immediately benefit children, the goal would be modeling a better internet for everyone. Open-source software could be repurposed to serve all ages, public websites could be valuable for adults as well as children, and any successful service could be cloned for adults. Similar to city-run municipal broadband, and adjacent to the public-tech movement Tarnoff has dubbed digital sewer socialism, it could provide much-needed competition that pushes tech companies to offer better service. Meanwhile, even these companies might see a nominal tax as better than onerous regulations and as an opportunity for good PR.
There are, of course, plenty of practical details to hammer out. You might need to tack on some additional requirements: a ban on commercial activity by users (similar to the stance of nonprofit fiction platform Archive of Our Own), perhaps, and a requirement that any software be open-source. There’s the matter of figuring out which government agency would oversee the program, what category of companies would be taxed, who would evaluate the grants, and how they’d be evaluated for effectiveness, for instance.
But a lot of the obvious objections seem specious. Some grant recipient or other will almost inevitably have a serious security or moderation failure, but almost certainly with less harm than its commercial counterparts. The program will be a lightning rod for complaints about government efficiency and culture war topics, but so are cancer vaccines. At a time when nothing seems to work, why not swing for the fences and try something new?
The US government helped create the internet — and for all the flaws of the digital world, it’s a damaged space that’s worth repairing. It’s time for the government to help re-create it, too.
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