Even U.S struggles to fight child porn on the net

The fight against child pornography is an ongoing challenge. "The child porn industry, unfortunately, is something we'll never be able to declare complete victory against. This is the first generation with webcams and the Net, so parents, and companies, have to learn how to deal with this."

The U.S. has the dubious honor of hosting more online child porn sites than anywhere is the world, according to an international agency that tracks such sites.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reports that some 50 percent of online child pornography can be traced to U.S. sites, compared to 15 percent in Russia, 12 percent in Japan, and 0.2 percent in the UK. The foundation also noted that some Web sites containing child abuse content remain accessible for up to five years despite being reported to authorities.

Figures for the U.S. can be attributed to the fact that it has the most ISPs and handles the most Internet traffic, according to the IWF.

Awareness Grows

During the first half of this year, the IWF said it received 14,000 reports of online child pornography, up 24 percent from the year-ago period. The increase was attributed to public intolerance of child abuse content along with an increased awareness of the agency's role in combating the problem.

In a statement, IWF chief executive Peter Robbins said, "2006 is proving to be our busiest year yet; with record reports processed and a record number of Web sites confirmed to contain child abuse content. In addition, more of our members are choosing to implement blocking mechanisms so their customers are protected from being inadvertently exposed to potentially illegal sites."

Taking Action

This report comes on the heels of an announcement last month that EarthLink, Microsoft , Yahoo, AOL, and United Online will contribute $1 million and technical support to a Technology Coalition within the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a 22-year old group that is a leader in this effort.

The coalition will develop and implement technology solutions to detect and disrupt the distribution of child pornography across the Internet. That effort will include a central clearinghouse of images and related information, developing better law-enforcement tools, and evaluating the technologies used by child predators.

Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio noted in a recent interview that ISPs have collaborated before for similar efforts, including combating software piracy. "It's a good start," she said, "although I'd like to see Google and MySpace, among others, join them."

The fight against child pornography is an ongoing challenge, she noted. "The child porn industry, unfortunately, is something we'll never be able to declare complete victory against. This is the first generation with webcams and the Net, so parents, and companies, have to learn how to deal with this."

Mukul Krishna, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan pointed out that tech companies must take a scientific approach to the image-recognition system at the core of the database effort. If a family is exchanging innocent pictures of a baby having a first bath, for example, the technology will have to be able to differentiate those images from child porn, he said.