The IWF has decided to start issuing take-down notices directly to foreign hosting where it finds child abuse images, it was announced today. Eve Salomon, Chair of the IWF Board of Trustees, made the announcement speaking at the ISPA UK annual conference today.

Until now the IWF relied on foreign partner hotlines and law enforcement agencies when it discovers child abuse images hosted on foreign hosting services. This has been strongly criticised as resulting in slow take-down times, notably in an academic paper by Moore & Clayton and its subsequent publicity: the problem is that too many foreign hotlines and law enforcement agencies simply don’t pass the notice along to the hosting provider, or delay doing so severely.

The IWF announcement marks a new approach to tackling child abuse images online, which has recently been heavily focused on the government target to introduce network-based blocking of URLs that the IWF determines contain child abuse content. The IWF’s web page describing their blocking “initiative” has been updated to de-emphasise that approach:

We consider removal at source to be the most effective way of combating child sexual abuse images online and other criminal content within our remit which has been almost eradicated from UK networks.
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Whilst child sexual abuse images hosted abroad remain available, the UK internet industry has voluntarily agreed to block access to them using a list provided by the IWF. We consider blocking to be a short-term disruption tactic which can help protect internet users from stumbling across these images, whilst processes to have them removed are instigated. — IWF statement