Leaked Home Office documents have revealed how this year’s Queens Speech will contain details of a serious crackdown on UK broadband ISPs, specifically those that have failed to tackle online child abuse websites. The government is expected to make blocking such content a mandatory requirement and could fine or even criminalise an ISP for failing to tackle the problem.

The latest statistics show that 98.5% of UK ISPs already block or remove illegal child abuse sites through a self-regulation body known as the Internet Watch Foundation ( IWF ). The IWF runs a blocklist of websites to help ISPs filter out those containing related content.


Opponents of the move are concerned that this hard-line approach is unnecessary at a time when the voluntary method is already "working well". There are also many aspects that will be hard or even impossible to stop, regardless of rule changes, such as abuse content exchanged over encrypted p2p (file sharing) channels.

There are fears that the new law will force UK ISPs to deal directly with Scotland Yard, who are inexperienced in this area and could actually undermine the IWFs existing efforts. Not to mention that ISP implementations of the IWFs list haven't always worked as intended (Wikipedia block and Internet archive block).



Several other UK ISPs , including Zen Internet , have also raised concerns about the effectiveness of IWF and similar filtering systems. Not only are such methods easily circumvented but there are also many other ways of exchanging content where ISPs simply have no way of either seeing or restricting it.

However nobody should be surprised by this move, several prominent government ministers have been lobbying for such action to be taken for awhile, as have a number of child charities (here). The European Union (EU) also proposed similar measures back in April (here).