ALBANY, N.Y. — Internet providers Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to child pornography and eliminate the material from their servers, New York’s attorney general said Tuesday.
The companies also will pay $1.1 million to help fund efforts to remove the online child porn created and disseminated by users through their services, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said. The changes will affect customers nationwide.
Investigators said they found 88 news groups devoted to child pornography in an investigation over six to eight months. More than 11,000 images were collected using software that identifies child pornography by tracking patterns in the pixels of the images, Cuomo’s office said.
Cuomo said the companies acted immediately when told of the concern. He said it was essential to work with the Internet providers rather than trying to prosecute thousands of users.
“There’s no doubt this is a tough issue,” Cuomo said at a news conference. “People are very creative, and there is a market for this filth. We have to work together.”
The agreements follow an undercover investigation of child-porn news groups. Cuomo said in a prepared statement that his investigation of other service providers is continuing. He has used similar probes and the possibility of civil or criminal charges to extract concessions on Internet safety in the past.
Time Warner Cable acted as soon as it learned that users were posting objectionable material and eliminated the news groups, a mainstay of the Internet from its early days, said spokesman Alex Dudley.
He emphasized that Time Warner didn’t host or provide any of the content and was simply a portal, allowing groups to be created with content provided by the users.
“As soon as we were made aware of the issue . . . we took steps to correct,” Dudley said Tuesday.
Verizon acted immediately to shut down the sites, Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said.
