Andrew Cuomo, New York Attorney General, has been fighting one of those fights that you sadly cannot win: to rid the Internet of child pornography. Believe me, as a father of four I would love to say that it was possible but as a technology journalist with some 20 years experience of writing about the online world and the people who inhabit it I know that it isn't. It would take a sea change in terms of international cooperation, both legal and political, for starters and that's without even thinking about the technological hurdles that would need to be jumped. Still, according to the New York Times Cuomo has won a small victory in the battle against the paedophiles, even if the war itself looks set to wage on indefinitely.

That victory comes as three of the bigger US service providers have agreed to block child sex abuse sites and bulletin boards alike. Sprint, Time Warner Cable and Verizon have all come clean and admitted that they will bring a broad brush to the likes of Usenet which has been exploited by paedophiles as both an avenue of communication and a system of image exchange for as long as I can remember.

The Inquirer reveals that coming to this conclusion was not as straightforward as you might imagine, however. "Despite the fact that service providers clearly state in their customer service agreements that certain activity (including child sex abuse) is severely discouraged, they rarely do anything to prevent it, or to remove the sites once they are up" says reporter Sylvie Barak, continuing "Sprint, Verizon and Time Warner only agreed to enter negotiations after a sting type operation proved that the companies totally ignored any 'consumer' (or undercover attorney general employee) complaints about illicit material."

It appears that only after threatening to bring charges against the ISPs for fraud and deceptive business practises, if the reports are to be believed, did the acts get cleaned up. Which kind of proves, I guess, that where there is a will there is a way. Indeed, several more ISPs are said by the New York Times to be in negotiation with Cuomo on following suit. The trouble is that while I agree you have to start somewhere, New York is a little fish in a hug international Internet sea. Heck, where there is precious little evidence of a groundswell of other US States taking the same approach as New York, let alone other nation states around the world, the hopelessness of the situation starts to become clear.

Unfortunately, I do not have a workable answer to the problem although I look forward to reading yours…