In a previous blog I reported that in 2018 the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) identified and took action against 105,047 urls containing child sex abuse material. That was an increase on the previous year where they identified 78,589.
Of the 105,047, 84,055 (80%) were concentrated in just five top level domains. In order of magnitude these were: .com, .net, .co, .ru, and .to. By a large margin .com and .net were miles ahead of the field.
On further analysis of the data I learned that the 105,047 urls against which the IWF took action were located in 3,899 sub-domains (up by 3% on the previous year) which, in turn, were spread across 151 top level domains.
In total there are approximately 1,500 top levels domains. Thus, about 10% of all the top level domains generated 100% of the action taken by the IWF against all domains.
I suppose it must be possible that in other top level domains there were child sex abuse materials that were not reported to the IWF or were not found by them through their proactive searching, but absent any data on that it does rather look as if the problem is highly concentrated in a comparatively small number of places.
Maybe the crooks and paedophiles who engage in this sort of activity know where to avoid and where to target. And if they do, so must others in a position to act to bring this disgraceful state of affairs to an end.
Desiderata 