Earlier this month NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made a big deal about how he'd managed to get AOL and Time Warner Cable (TWC) to stop offering access to child porn newsgroups. The only thing was, AOL stopped offering newsgroup access three years ago to cut costs, and TWC had already been considering the cost-cutting move. So while the announcement got Cuomo's name in lights, nothing actually changed -- and even AOL admitted they weren't doing a single thing differently.

Apparently envious that you could get a lot of positive press without actually doing much of anything, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association issued their own press release this week stating that cable operators have also now struck a "historic agreement" with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).But with concerned citizens, advocacy organizations and enforcement agencies out there keeping an eye peeled for such content, ISPs were already taking child porn offline when it was presented to them. So far this latest anti-child porn push appears to have done little more than give ISPs a justification for culling (AT&T stopped offering all alt.binary groups) or eliminating newsgroup access, while providing politicians and companies with positive press.

Of course the use of such watch lists also raises questions in terms of defining offensive material (anime? hentai?), and whether cementing ISPs as content nannies is a particularly good idea. Next up: filtering "extremism"?