NEW YORK, NY – Comcast Corp. appears ready to knuckle under to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s demand that the communications giant’s internet service provider division cease offering access to newsgroups or face a lawsuit. On Tuesday, Comcast said it expects to sign an agreement with the AG’s office that will remove all newsgroup content from Philadelphia-based Comcast Cable’s servers.The announcement followed by one day the company’s receipt of a letter from Cuomo threatening to take legal action unless Comcast followed the example set by five other large American ISPs that signed agreements with Cuomo’s office in June and July. The others were AT&T, America Online, Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable. Comcast, the No. 2 ISP in the U.S. (after AT&T and before America Online) was the final holdout among the Big Six. All now are locked into a deal requiring them to force their customers to find alternative access to all newsgroups except those that instruct users about the establishment and maintenance of newsgroups.
“We appreciate the hard work by Attorney General Cuomo and his Attorney General colleagues on the pressing issue of child pornography on the internet,” Comcast said in a prepared statement. “In fact, last week Comcast joined with nearly the entire cable industry and 48 state attorneys general and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to sign an unprecedented and highly praised industry-wide agreement to fight child pornography. Comcast has been working with the New York Attorney General, and we expect to become a signatory to his agreement as well.”
Most ISPs and 48 state attorneys general have signed onto the National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s code of conduct, which requires ISPs to block websites listed on the NCMEC’s list of known child-pornography websites. Cuomo, however, said he felt the NCTA’s agreement fell “well short of the full range of measures set out in [New York’s] code of conduct.” Although the NCTA’s code of conduct targets websites it makes no mention of newsgroups, and that is a serious shortcoming, Cuomo has indicated.
Although Comcast is the nation’s second-largest ISP, it provides service to less than one half of 1 percent of the broadband users in New York state.
