Child Porn "Discussion Groups" Purged

Two of the largest U.S. Internet providers have eliminated access to discussion groups that featured child pornography, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday.

AT&T, the nation's largest Internet service provider, and AOL, the third largest, also agreed to purge their servers of child porn Web sites.

Cuomo said Internet service providers can't drag their feet in protecting children "and instead must quickly purge child porn from their servers."

He announced similar commitments last month from Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable.

The agreements target so-called newsgroups, which contain messages posted from many users at different locations.

They came after investigators from Cuomo's office reviewed millions of pictures over several months and found 88 different newsgroups that contained 11,390 lewd photos of prepubescent children.

Cuomo has used similar investigations and the possibility of civil or criminal charges to extract concessions on Internet safety in the past.

Last year, he reached agreements with the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook to toughen protections against online sexual predators.

Cuomo's office also drafted the "Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act," which was signed into law by Gov. David Paterson in May. It restricts certain sex offenders' use of the Internet.