New York Attorney General gets agreement to limit child pornography

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced this week that Time Warner Cable, Sprint, and Verizon will take aggressive steps to limit access to child pornography over their networks.

Mr. Cuomo's office began an investigation of online child pornography over six months ago. Undercover agents from his office would pose as subscribers and complain to Internet providers that they were allowing child pornography even though they had customer service agreements that discouraged such activity. When the providers' responses did not satisfy the AG's office, they threatened legal action.

Cuomo's office uncovered 88 internet Usenet newsgroups used by child pornographers, as well as more than 11,000 "sexually lewd photos featuring prepubescent children." The agreement with broadband providers means that they will broadly curb customers' access to Usenet -- which began nearly 30 years ago and was one of the earliest ways to swap information online -- even though only a handful of the 100,000 Usenet discussion groups contain illegal material.

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas." The agreements will affect customers not just in New York but throughout the country.

The three service providers will also pay $1.125 million to the Attorney General's office and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to fund further efforts.

While government watchdog groups in other countries have succeeded in getting Internet service providers to limit the kind of traffic available on their networks, this seems to be the first significant agreement in the United States, where protected speech is an important civil liberty. Britain's Internet Watch Foundation estimates that nearly 80 per cent of the world's commercial child pornography is hosted on web servers located in the United States, but only a handful of service providers have signed on with NCMEC. (Federal law requires service providers to report child pornography to the National Center, but it often takes customer complaints to trigger a report.)