Internet providers Verizon, Sprint and moment Warner Cable have agreed to block access to child pornography and eliminate the material from their servers, New York’s attorney general said Tuesday.

The companies additionally will pay $1.1 million to help fund efforts to remove the online child porn created and disseminated by users through their services, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said. The changes will affect customers nationwide.

date Warner Cable acted as soon as it learned that users were posting objectionable material and eliminated the newsgroups, a mainstay of the Net from its early days, said spokesman Alex Dudley.

He emphasized that instance Warner didn’t host or supply any of the subject matter and was simply a portal, allowing groups to be created with subject matter provided by the users.

“As soon as we were made aware of the issue … we took steps to exact,” Dudley said Tuesday.

The agreements follow an undercover examination of child porn newsgroups. Cuomo said in a prepared

statement that his study of other service providers is continuing. He has used similar probes and the possibility of civil or criminal charges to extract concessions on Web safety in the past.

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

Verizon acted immediately to shut down the sites, Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said.

“There are citizens doing whatever they do on the World Wide Web all the moment and we can’t possibly scan every use group,” he said. “But there are some things we can do and as soon as it’s brought to our attention, we work very quickly.”

“The tension there is amoung allowing customers the ability to communicate with their privacy rights protected, and preventing citizens from doing things that are illegal,” Rabe said.

Verizon and instance Warner Cable are two of the five largest World Wide Web service providers…

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