Sprint, Verizon and Time Warner Cable Help Fight Child Pornography

Three of the United States’ biggest ISPs yesterday announced plans to block child pornography websites.

The agreements follow an undercover investigation of child porn newsgroups and will affect customers nationwide, the Associated Press reports.

New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo yesterday announced that Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint had agreed with to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups.

Aside from that, the companies also agreed to pay $1.125 million to help fund efforts to remove child porn from the Internet.

However while this is a great initiative, it is likely that any of these sites that are closed down could crop up again offshore.

Professor Christine Corcos of the Louisiana State University Law Center told the AP,

"They are very inventive and obviously a lot of this industry moves offshore very quickly. As long as the people who produce this material think they have markets, and they think they can reach that market, they are going to continue and the thing is they can just move to other countries."

Attorney General Cuomo was also involved in last year’s agreement with MySpace whereby the social networking site released the information 6,000 sex offenders to law enforcement agencies, who in turn used the information to check if any of them had violated probation by contacting minors.

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