Our corporate partnership with Nominet

Nominet is a public benefit company, responsible for the .UK domain, which is a vital part of the internet infrastructure, supporting millions of businesses, organisations and individuals using .UK domains. It uses DNS technology and expertise to protect public services from cyber threats, and funds an ambitious social impact campaign that aims to tackle the challenge of growing up in a digital world, including countering online harm.

Nominet’s Countering Online Harm Fund, launched in late 2019, offers child protection networks additional resources to respond to the ever-changing threats that can devastate children’s lives.

The fund is designed to ensure simple and rapid access to funds and has given IWF the freedom and flexibility to pilot new tools and initiatives to meet the growing threat of child sexual abuse online.

Nominet provided three years of funding, totalling over £450,000, to the IWF to support the development of software design products, including an image classifier using artificial intelligence, and machine learning to identify and classify child sexual abuse images found online. This allows IWF Analysts to process more images far more quickly, resulting in more child sexual abuse images being removed from the internet.

The funding has also been used to develop further transformative improvements to the image classifier, which have increased the accuracy of the hash lists that IWF provides to internet service providers, and to improve IWF’s cybersecurity.

Nominet is also the funder of the UK Safer Internet Centre - a partnership of three leading child protection organisations: SWGfL, Childnet International and the IWF. The three charities run the UK’s annual Safer Internet Day, to promote the safe and responsible use of technology for young people, and provide advice, campaigns and resources to help ensure that children and young people in the UK are able to use the internet safely. Read more about this grant here.

Eleanor Bradley, MD of Registry Solutions and Public Benefit at Nominet says:

“IWF performs an important role – one that is essential to making sure that the internet is a trusted and safe space. Working closely with them is a story of successful collaboration for a very worthy cause that gives us the confidence that .UK is a hostile place for those intent on causing harm online. We know that any issues will be identified and addressed immediately and professionally - with adequate checks and balances in place thanks to their technical expertise and tireless work which is second to none.

“Our Countering Online Harm Fund is designed to help our partners like the IWF build and develop tech solutions and draw on external expertise without red tape slowing progress. It's important that the fund is able to free up partners to use their experience and judgement to think further ahead and identify how technology can help them in the race against those who are intent on causing harm online. They’ve been able to draw down on this money when necessary to support research, initiatives and digital development programmes - we’re very happy to see it put to good use every day, and that three new projects in the pipeline will help to protect young people from the most serious of online harms both here in the UK and overseas.”

Nick Wenban-Smith, General Counsel and Head of Stakeholder Relations at Nominet says:

“IWF is a key member of our network of trusted partners who help us ensure that criminal content is not tolerated in .UK. Thanks to the IWF’s services, we are proud to have one of the cleanest Top Level Domains in the world. In 2020 we had 11 reports of CSAM associated with .UK domains. In each case the content in the country of hosting was removed from the internet, without needing to suspend the domain. As in previous years we had zero reports of CSAM in .wales or .cymru.”