Articles labeled: verizon

In what surely is going to spark of a huge free speech debate, some of New York’s largest ISPs have agreed to block user groups, news groups and forums that disseminate child pornography.

With the agreement announced Tuesday, [New York Attorney General Andrew] 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 said that the service providers blocked child pornography found in 88 newsgroups by his investigators. Newsgroups, a mainstay of the Internet from its early days, are essentially online message boards in which users can post text and files in any of thousands of categories.

The companies also agreed to eliminate the material from their servers and will pay $1.125 million to help fund efforts to remove child porn from the Internet.

The agreements follow a six- to eight-month undercover investigation of child porn newsgroups, and they will affect customers nationwide.