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Internet Service Providers are being urged by every influential all-party Commons committee to set up an industry-wide body to ensure service providers contend agreed minimum standards of child safety across the internet in the UK.

MPs on the Culture, Media and Sport committee said they were "unimpressed" by the claims of providers hosting services offering video-sharing and other user-generated material that its volume precluded pre-vetting of material. It urged that "proactive go over again of content should be standard practice with a view to sites hosting user-generated content" involving technological tools for identifying potentially harmful material as origin as human intervention.

The publish suggests the independent body, made up of industry representatives and lay members, should "police self-regulation and to give consumers confidence " by ensuring recommendations of a proposed new UK Council on Child Internet Safety are carried out. It added: "We encourage sites which handle user-generated content to develop as a priority."

More alarmingly for ISPs, the report talked about government concern over sites glorifying terrorism and containing information likely to help terrorists and others containing material claimed to incite racial hatred as well at the same time that material which might harm vulnerable adults. This is seen as potential for the consideration of powers involving internet policing far wider than that carried to the end through the Internet Watch Foundation dedicated to eradicating material involving child abuse.

The committee was told by body of executive officers witnesses that they wanted ISPs and others to take a more proactive role identifying offending physical and removing it if in the UK or blocking access to overseas sites claimed to contain " harmful" content.

The report claimed Nicholas Lansman, Secretary-General of the Internet Service Providers Association, stressed in evidence that the efforts would welcome greater clarity, that would enable businesses to enforce their articles of agreement and conditions."

But it admitted: "Not all witnesses favoured an approach that designates more types of content as illegal and which places an onus upon ISPs and others to prevent entrance once they become conscious of such content."

MPs also urged the creation of one international forum at which governments or regulators from across the world could try to find common ground on in what plight to govern access to content.

And they urged ministers to step up pressure on smaller ISPs who have failed to exclude sites tagged by their IWF.on ground of cost.

Further reading:

• China continues to caviller internet for Olympics

• Google Street View does not quarrel privacy, says ICO

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