Comcast to sign New York's anti-child-porn code

Comcast Corp. said yesterday that it expected to sign an agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to try to reduce the availability of child pornography on the Internet.

Its statement came after Cuomo, in a letter also dated yesterday, threatened to begin legal action against the Philadelphia-based cable and Internet company within five days if it didn't sign.

The threat and quick response came 11 days after Cuomo announced that AT&T Inc. and AOL, the nation's first- and third-largest Internet service providers, signed agreements to curtail access to child pornography. In June, Verizon Communications Inc., Time Warner Cable and Sprint signed similar agreements.

The agreements focus on removing child-pornography Web sites and newsgroups. Newsgroups are online gatherings of people who share a common interest and exchange information and photographs.

Comcast, in its statement, said: "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 had already taken some action on child pornography.

Last week, the cable giant 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 online child pornography," Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said.

These agreements raise questions, said Michael Macleod-Ball, chief legislative and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Nobody likes child pornography," Macleod-Ball said. "But what about people who are innocent? What about Web sites that are mistakenly taken down?"

Meanwhile, Comcast is under increasing pressure from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin to sell cable channels separately.

Selling channels a la carte would allow viewers to avoid - and not pay for - channels they consider indecent, instead of being required to accept them as part of multi-channel packages.

"We never had an FCC chairman that cared about the indecency standards and the family until Kevin Martin," Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values Action in Ohio, said in a recent interview.

Cable companies say this would ultimately cost customers more.

Ironically, the FCC is also putting pressure on Comcast to loosen - not tighten - control over another aspect of Internet use.

The company has been accused of blocking the sending and receiving of movies and other giant files over its network through services such as BitTorrent. The FCC has demanded Comcast cease. The company has said it was not targeting certain users, but did have the right to ensure space on its network for all its customers.

Under the anti-child-pornography agreement, signed by Comcast and several other Internet companies, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children will provide a list of Web sites and newsgroups that include child pornography to Internet service providers, which will remove the sites from their servers.

"Comcast has been working with the New York Attorney General, and we expect to become a signatory to his agreement as well," Comcast's Fitzmaurice said.

While Comcast is a top Internet provider nationally, in New York state, she said, Comcast has less than half of 1 percent of the broadband market.

In his letter to Comcast, Cuomo said his "office is gravely concerned that Comcast, the second-largest Internet Service Provider in the country, has continued to drag its heels when it comes to taking every necessary action to eliminate online child porn from the Internet."

Cuomo set a deadline of five days before his office would "pursue the legal remedies open to it to stop child pornography."

Cuomo's letter, addressed to Comcast general counsel Douglas Gaston, dismissed concerns about government's overreaching into constitutionally protected free speech.

"Because the possession or distribution of child pornography is both a federal and state felony," Cuomo wrote, "it is not protected by the First Amendment."

He said his "Code of Conduct" would allow the companies to take actions that were "surgically directed at only that felonious material and not at any protected content."

That's why, said ACLU's Macleod-Ball, it is up to law-enforcement agencies to enforce the law against child pornography by getting "judicially issued warrants" to shut down the offending sites.

The agreements with Cuomo and also all the attorneys general, he said, are allowing third-party groups - cable companies, nonprofit groups, and attorneys general offices - to remove the sites "without any judicial oversight. There is something wrong with that."

The ACLU official said it would be difficult for Comcast or any business to take a stand in favor of First Amendment rights when the issue is child pornography.