ALBANY, N.Y. - According to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, AT&T and AOL are among the latest to join Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable in eliminating access to child pornography discussion groups.
Additionally, the two ISP giants have agreed to rid their servers of websites surrounding child porn. All five ISPs will eliminate any child pornography websites on their servers listed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable, as part of their agreements, will execute new protocols that will facilitate quicker responses to complaints surrounding child porn. The three companies will also contribute a total of $1.125 million to aid the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Usenet newsgroups came under fire after investigators from Cuomo's office identified 88 different groups that contained approximately 11,000 photos of potentially underage children.
Time Warner has completely blocked Usenet, AT&T is blocking alt.binary newsgroups, Sprint is preventing access to the alt.* hierarchy and Verizon is assessing newsgroups on an individual basis. Due to a lack of subscriber interest, AOL quit offering newsgroups back in 2005.
AT&T is the nation's largest Internet service provider; AOL is the third largest.
