Time Warner Cable (TWC), Verizon and Sprint Nextel will cut off access to Usenet and will block access to a few designated sites in response to pressure by New York State to restrict access to child pornography.

New York’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that the three have agreed to “eliminate access to child porn Newsgroups, a major supplier of these illegal images, and will also purge their servers of child porn Web sites.”

Cuomo’s office has been conducting an ongoing investigation into child porn on the Internet. TWC, Verizon and Sprint are apparently only the first companies to agree to block the designated forums.

The three will also contribute $1.1 million to help fund efforts to remove the online child porn created and disseminated by users through their services, according to Cuomo’s office.

Currently, Internet service providers (ISPs) are legally inoculated from responsibility for any content they carry. Several Internet groups are concerned that Cuomo’s plan undermines that legal protection and can open the floodgates for other types or categories of material available on the Internet.

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