A "family" is not a single entity. It's not voluntary for those who are being blocked.
It is entirely commonplace for a family to impose restrictions on its children — anything less is neglect.
It also seems very strange to deem not restricting information as neglect. Why not just have a conversation about them as to why they shouldn't do whatever you want them not to do? Advice doesn't breed distrust, but censorship and other regulations do.
What's more important is protecting children (think <10) from coming across pornography accidentally while browsing the internet and looking at kid stuff. It's not only fairly well-accepted by society but in many jurisdictions, allowing children to see pornography is considered neglect.
I think you need to speak to more parents.
For a DNS service that could become a kind of LetsEncrypt of DNS, its use case will be a little bit of everything. Cloudflare already has to make moral and social policing decisions, but then again, the bigger your company, the more morally interesting decisions it has to consider. This is especially the case when you're the kind of infrastructure company that serves the world.
Moral filters are going to be about the enforcement of moral norms. Are sites about condom usage, abortion, STD's, premarital sex, and homosexuality an adult topic? Are race relations an adult topic? Are shootings an adult topic? Is this going to be the kind of filter you lift at precisely the age of 12?
There's naturally going to be a lot of questions about how a filter is going to interact with situations, because it's going to be Cloudflare's vision of the web. In my view, DNS settings are often things other people set up for you and you don't really think about it.
I think you're partially right but kids don't need to understand the underlying reasoning, they just need to be told what to do. When I was in school, everyone used PHP-based proxy sites to access restricted material on the school network. Nobody had a clue what a "proxy" was or how it worked, they just knew that's what they had to Google to get at whatever they wanted to get at.
Kids these days are the same. They don't need to know what "DNS" is or how a VPN works, they just need to know that a friend told them to look for a VPN app on the app store.
> Are sites about condom usage, abortion, STD's, premarital sex, and homosexuality an adult topic? Are race relations an adult topic?
The question isn't so much "are these adult topics" as "are these topics parents will want small children to encounter on the internet" and I'd say that's a definite "no".
That isn't to say small children shouldn't learn about them, they'll definitely need to be taught, however I don't think that many parents would be comfortable with their children being taught by whatever resources their child happens to stumble upon.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that homosexuality or interracial relations are morally any different to regular relationships, I'm saying that internet material isn't likely to be suitable for educating small children. It'll be very easy for them to stumble across material that's overly sexual in nature, racist or homophobic.
FWIW I come from a country where sex education is covered fairly well by both primary and secondary school curricula, which may colour my response here.
> Are shootings an adult topic?
That one's difficult and depends on the specific cultural norms you live under I think.
> Is this going to be the kind of filter you lift at precisely the age of 12?
That's a decision for the parents.
She's 2.5. Lots of things in her life aren't voluntary. It's my responsibility and choice to keep her safe. You can let your kids watch all the lemon parties they want but I'll just keep that stuff blocked.
If your 2.5 year old is mature enough to manage that, then yeah, maybe they ought to be able to have unfettered internet access, too.
Think of it like a child safety lock: you only need them until they can figure them out. By the time they know how they work, you can have a conversation with them about being safe around the house.
On the matter of ethics, while I don't feel inclined to filter the world away from older kids, I'm firmly believe you're wrong. There's nothing unethical about making choices for your kids until they're old enough to make informed choices. The amount of garbage online (revenge porn, sexual degradation of women, red pills) makes easy for kids to find bad information at an age where they can't process is correctly. Parents determine what age that is because that's their role and it's entirely situational.
Found your issue, go and use an adblocker (or dns-based adblock filtering)
> revenge porn
Indistinguishable from normal porn
> sexual degradation of women
Just because you are not into extreme bdsm it does not mean that it is garbage.
> red pills
Your 2.5 year olds won't be able to read it. If they somehow find a way then you simply have to explain to them why you think that it is wrong.
The only "bad information" are straight up lies.
I don't think that kids watching explicit content is something they should be doing, but treating them like property rather than someone you can genuinely influence the views of in a positive way is incredibly destructive.
Why not install an ad-blocker on the tablet and be done with it? If she's 2.5 and for some reason going to explicit sites with intention, you should be fast-tracking her to private schooling, not installing filters on information.
> not installing filters on information.
you're literally advocating opposing viewpoints in the same phrase
1. Protecting my child sufficiently that they will grow up to be a relatively non-traumatized adult.
2. Teaching them about life
3. Protecting others from my child
Obviously #1 and #3 are in tension with #2, as harm is part of life, and natural consequences are great teachers.
In public school where I live, the internet is required for at least some of their work starting around 2nd or 3rd grade. No reasonable filter is going to let me give them otherwise unfettered access to the internet at that age. I find having the computer in an area where I can see the screen is good. It's possible that 1.1.1.3 might be helpful in making it a bit harder for them to stumble something while my back is turned for 2 minutes cooking dinner or helping out a sibling.
Obviously there are limits to what I can do. I have one kid with PTSD that we closely monitored internet usage for at home, told the school she ought not be on any internet connected evice in class, but still managed to cyberbully a classmate to the point where the victim withdrew from school by editing a shared google-document during classtime.
Another kid was shown some fairly extreme pornography in 2nd grade by an older student who had a cell-phone.