If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.
I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
I think it's a fools errand to try to keep building walled gardens and hoping to keep the vermin out. What I'm proposing is a literal second internet. No ads, no adult content, no third party tracking, and with training wheels.
We need children to understand what internet scams are, we need them to understand how to use a search engine, and we need them to develop behavioral norms with respect to social media.. we can't do that by just yelling at them to go outside.
So I earnestly want to know how much this would cost.
Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates.
My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay).
[0] or a multitude, corresponding to film content rating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_...
[1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are.
[2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.
The bulk of exploitation comes from
1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop
2. Other kids bullying each other
Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".