Frankly, policy-making at the IWF is becoming what the bloke down the pub thinks

Malcolm Hutty, civil rights campaigner

Civil liberties campaigner Malcolm Hutty resigned from the board this week in protest over the blanket banning of newsgroups.

"By just going on the name of the newsgroup, there will be legal stuff that is banned as well. There was no debate and I felt that if there wasn't the opportunity to state a case there wasn't any point being there," he told BBC News Online.

He believes the organisation is becoming more hardline and less willing to listen to argument.

"Frankly, policy-making at the IWF is becoming what the bloke down the pub thinks," he said.

Pressure on ISPs

The IWF was conceived as the internet industry's own self-regulated body to deal with illegal net content and avoid police intervention. It is largely funded by internet service providers.

With its new desire to put pressure on ISPs, Mr Hutty is not convinced that funding will last.

"How long will ISPs want to fund an organisation that is just used as a political stick to beat them with?" he asked.

It is hard to gauge the amount of paedophile activity on the net but two huge police raids in recent years have uncovered online paedophile rings with hundreds of members trading thousands of illegal images of children.

Popular chatrooms on services like Yahoo's instant messaging service have also been used by paedophiles to involve children in inappropriate sexual conversations.

Two other members of the IWF board have recently resigned. New board members include Dr Sonia Livingstone, an expert on how children use the internet and Jim Reynolds, an international consultant on the issues of paedophilia and first head of the Paedophilia Unit at Scotland Yard.