As part of its function, the IWF says that it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content".

[10] It has been criticized as an ineffective quango that does not deserve its charity status, for producing excessive numbers of false positives, for the secrecy of its proceedings, and for poor technical implementations of its policies that have degraded the response time of the whole UK Internet.

[11] During 1996, the Metropolitan Police told the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) that the content carried by some of the newsgroups made available by them was illegal, that they considered the ISPs involved to be publishers of that material, and that they were therefore breaking the law.

In August 1996, Chief Inspector Stephen French, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit, sent an open letter to the ISPA, requesting that they ban access to a list of 132 newsgroups, many of which were deemed to contain pornographic images or explicit text.

We trust that with your co-operation and self regulation it will not be necessary for us to move to an enforcement policy.The list was arranged so that the first section consisted of unambiguously titled paedophile newsgroups, then continued with other kinds of groups which the police wanted to restrict access to, including alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cheerleaders and alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.centerfolds.

[13] Although this action had taken place without any prior debate in Parliament or elsewhere, the police, who appeared to be doing their best to create and not simply to enforce the law, were not acting entirely on their own initiative.

Alan Travis, Home Affairs editor of the newspaper The Guardian, explained in his book Bound and Gagged that Ian Taylor, the Conservative Science and Industry Minister at the time, had underlined an explicit threat to ISPs that if they did not stop carrying the newsgroups in question, the police would act against any company that provided their users with "pornographic or violent material".

Taylor went on to make it clear that there would be calls for legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet unless service providers were seen to wholeheartedly embrace "responsible self-regulation".

[14] The ISP Demon Internet regarded the police request as "unacceptable censorship"; however, its attitude annoyed ISPA chairman Shez Hamill, who said: We are being portrayed as a bunch of porn merchants.

[15] During the summer and autumn of 1996 the UK police made it known that they were planning to raid an ISP with the aim of launching a test case regarding the publication of obscene material over the Internet.

[16] A report by IWF published in July 2024, revealed a significant increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online.

[17] [18] Facilitated by the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI), discussions were held between certain ISPs, the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, and a body called the "Safety Net Foundation" (formed by the Dawe Charitable Trust).

[20] At the time, Patricia Hewitt, then Minister for E-Commerce, said: "The Internet Watch Foundation plays a vital role in combating criminal material on the Net."

To counter accusations that the IWF was biased in favour of the ISPs, a new independent chairman was appointed, Roger Darlington, former head of research at the Communication Workers Union.

[20] The IWF's website offers a web-based government-endorsed method for reporting suspect online content and remains the only such operation in the United Kingdom.

Potentially illegal content includes: However, almost the whole of the IWF site is concerned with suspected images of child sexual abuse with little mention of other criminally obscene material, also within their remit.

"[26] The IWF states that it works in partnership with UK Government departments such as the Home Office and the DCMS to influence initiatives and programmes developed to combat online abuse.

The IWF has connections[clarification needed] with the Virtual Global Taskforce, the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.

Previously, the IWF passed on notifications of suspected child pornography hosted on non-UK servers to the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service which in turn forwards it to Interpol or the relevant foreign police authority.

[34] A staff of 13 trained analysts are responsible for this work,[37] and the IWF's 2018 Annual Report says that on average, 376 new URLs were added to the list daily.

[40] In 2006, Home Office minister Alan Campbell pledged that all ISPs would block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007.

[48] A 2009 study by researcher Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge found that about a quarter of them were specific pages on otherwise legitimate free file hosting services, among them RapidShare, Megaupload, SendSpace and Zshare.

Users of some major ISPs, including BT, Vodafone, Virgin Media/Tesco.net, Be/O2, EasyNet/UK Online/Sky Broadband, PlusNet, Demon, and TalkTalk (Opal Telecom), were unable to access the filtered content.

[58] This is reported to be due to the single blacklisted article causing all Wikipedia traffic from ISPs using the system to be routed through a transparent proxy server.

The IWF lists the Internet companies which "have voluntarily committed to block access to child sexual abuse web pages".

J.R. Raphael of PC World stated that the incident had raised serious free-speech issues, and that it was alarming that one non-governmental organisation was ultimately acting as the "morality police" for about 95% of the UK's Internet users.

[69] Frank Fisher of The Guardian criticized the IWF for secretiveness and lack of legal authority, among other things, and noted that the blacklist could contain anything and that the visitor of a blocked address may not know if their browsing is being censored.

As a "self-appointed, self-regulated internet watchdog, which views user-submitted content and compiles a list of websites that it deems to contain illegal images" there have been questions raised[by whom?]

Internet companies which deploy services across the world implement the IWF URL List to help prevent people from stumbling across child sexual abuse imagery.

Addressing the IWF's Members at its AGM on 26 November 2013, Lord Macdonald said he was "deeply impressed" with the quality of staff and their "commitment and attention to freedom of expression and privacy rights".