Several new kid-safe websites like KidZui and iLand5.com have emerged that provide controlled environments where the content and communication are carefully monitored to protect kids from a variety of online risks.

Sound familiar? These products represent the latest evolution of the Internet walled garden concept – where only an exclusive set of content is provided to subscribers. Walled gardens can be a great way to go for families as long as you understand the limitations with using them.

A quick review of the Internet’s walled garden history provides insight into the rise and fall of restricted environments. Think of AOL in the early 1990’s; they built their brand by packaging a walled garden online experience in an easy-to-use interface that made millions of families feel safe enough to embrace the Internet. This combination powered AOL’s meteoric rise as the 800-pound gorilla of ISP’s, and ‘you’ve-got-mail’ became a globally recognized phrase.

Then their success came crashing down. What happened? The easy answer is to say that walled gardens failed to maintain or explain the core benefits they originally provided. In reality, it’s a bit more complex, but the rising popularity of the so-called kid-safe environments is a manifestation of buyer’s remorse by some who threw out walled gardens for so-called ‘free’ services and are now rethinking that choice.

Here’s what happened

In the early dot.com days, companies built their business models on the assumption that consumers would happily pay a subscription to use their online services. This proved to be a fatal miscalculation as consumers wanted it all – for free. Thousands of companies were stranded with no foreseeable source of income and the dot.com bubble burst.

The companies who weathered that storm had to figure out where revenue would come from – and found the best source of revenue was with advertisers.

Changing the revenue model marked an enormous shift. In that moment, we went from a model where consumers were the Internet services’ customers to an environment where the consumer became the commodity.

This shift affected every aspect of online services development. It meant that providing the best, safest experience to satisfy customer demands was no longer as important as driving new cool features that would bring in more users to view advertisements. It meant cutting abuse detection, monitoring and prevention tools while developing features that encouraged consumers to ‘share’ more personal information that could be data-mined and sold (and resold) to advertisers - and abused for cyberbullying, cyber-harassment, ID theft, sexual predation and a wide variety of other crimes.

The consequences of this shift were not hard to anticipate. When consumers were no longer the customers, the accountability to protect and provide the best services for us got lost.

And here we are. The Internet is a fantastic tool full of opportunity and promise, and it is our future. Yet it has been tarnished by greed, corporate arrogance and the basest of human nature. Many consumers are more fearful of using the Internet today than they were 10 years ago. Fourty-nine Attorney’s General have demanded that Internet companies provide remedies voluntarily or accept regulations.

The increasing demand for walled gardens is essentially an acknowledgement that internet sites and services in general have failed to provide the safeguards and settings consumers need for online safety, setting content preferences, and maintaining privacy.

In this void parents are scrambling to find safer alternatives for their children, and the walled gardens are regaining their appeal with three very clear benefits – that may outweigh the negatives:

Walled gardens are an excellent choice for the youngest of users. They are too limiting for older youth who need greater access to online content and need to learn to take responsibility for their own online actions in order to become independent, responsible internet citizens.

The ‘free’ Internet isn’t really free, we get what we pay for.

Linda