Internet Providers Agree to Control Access to Child Pornography

Three of the largest US ISPs have agreed to take steps to combat the spread of child pornography on the Internet. The Attorney General of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, announced on June 10, 2008 that Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint will undertake the following:

1. shut down Usenet "newsgroups" which are used to download and upload pornographic files about children,
2. purge their servers of all the web sites identified by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as concerned with child pornography
3. implement a system that allows a quick response to user complaints about child pornography, and
4. collectively donate $1.125 million towards additional efforts by the Attorney General's office and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to remove child pornography from the Internet.

The ISPs were reacting to an investigation by the Attorney General's office which culminated in threatened charges of fraud and deceptive business practices against the ISPs for insufficient reaction to user complaints about child pornography, despite their announced policies to the contrary. An important tool to monitor pornography is software that tracks patterns in the pixels of images accessible through the ISPs, and by this method investigators had identified 88 problematic newsgroups and 11,390 images. This new commitment marks a significant step in the fight against child exploitation. Nevertheless, Internet filtering raises important questions and freedom-of-expression concerns. Monitoring the filtering technology used would be necessary to ensure that only child pornography is filtered, and that other, innocent material is not censored unwittingly. For example, Pennsylvania's "Internet Child Pornography" law was struck down on 2004 on the ground that it blocked more than a million wholly innocent web sites. Although not yet clear how it will be implemented, the French Government also announced a program to have ISPs block access to child pornography. For more information from the New York State Attorney General, see the Press Release: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2008/june/june10a_08.html For more about the implications of filtering in this context visit: http://tinyurl.com/62og8k; or http://www.cdt.org/publications/pp_10.14.shtml For a news article on the French plans, see: http://wwww.silconvalley.com/news/ci_9540674 Summary by: Lea Epstein