The online distribution of sexual abuse material, including child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate imagery, is prohibited under U.S. law. The core challenge is not a lack of legal authority, but a lack of enforcement infrastructure capable of operating at internet scale.
Abusive content rarely resides on a single website. It propagates across a fragmented stack of online services: hosting providers, content delivery networks, registrars, search engines, payment processors, and advertising networks. These entities operate independently, often across jurisdictions, and lack a shared mechanism to validate reports, preserve evidence, or coordinate lawful action. As a result, victims, NGOs and law enforcement are left to navigate a diffuse and repetitive process: gathering proof, submitting notices, tracking re-uploads, and escalating failures—often without a clear endpoint.
This enforcement gap produces two systemic failures at once. Victims remain exposed to ongoing harm, while service providers, faced with incomplete information and legal uncertainty, either under-enforce or over-correct, risking both inaction and overbroad takedowns.
NCVIC was created to address this operational failure. We function as a neutral clearinghouse for verified reports of unlawful, non-consensual online content, providing a centralized process for validation, evidence coordination, and jurisdiction-aware notification. By consolidating technical review and legal verification upstream, we enable platforms and infrastructure providers to act decisively and consistently within existing law.
At the same time, NCVIC is designed to protect freedom of expression. We apply transparent verification standards, maintain a formal appeals process, and route reports only when material clearly violates statute or governing service rules. Our work is intentionally narrow in scope: we do not adjudicate speech, and we do not seek to expand the law by making new categories of expression illegal. We apply existing standards precisely, consistently, and with due process, and pursue policy reform only where established illegality cannot be meaningfully enforced in practice.
NCVIC's policy work is grounded in this operational reality. Rather than proposing broad new restrictions, we focus on improving the enforceability of existing statutes through data, repeatable process, and technical clarity. Our role is to provide a centralized, fair, and accountable enforcement pathway that reduces harm to victims, supports law enforcement, and enables service providers to act responsibly without compromising the open nature of the internet.