AfterTek

Several online forums that have posted thousands of images of child pornography have been taken off of three separate internet providers – said New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Two of the servers were some of the nation’s largest providers.

These new agreement were enforced by child-welfare advocates in order to push service providers to do more to monitor the things that people do on their servers and to prevent people from posting this kind of horrible images. While this helps to push horrible people off the internet it may also go against the First Amendment – free speech.

Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint agreed with Cuomo to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups, a hard-to-regulate sector of the Internet designed to bring together users with similar interests. With the agreement announced Tuesday, Cuomo skipped over the untold number of individual users accessing child porn and went to the portals that, unwittingly they all say, provided the route to sharing the illegal obsession.

Cuomo stated that the service providers have blocked child pornography and in the process found 88 newsgroups through investigators that were involved in it. These companies have also agreed to get rid of the material and will pay out $1.125 million to help fund these efforts. The agreements follow a six- to eight-month undercover investigation of child porn newsgroups, and they will affect customers nationwide.