Dear Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown,
CISPA agrees with the desire to reduce and eliminate child pornography from the Internet. We also believe that a single solution will not fix the problem. Our Association is more than willing to continue to work with all concerned parties to aggressively pursue and remove such content from the Internet.
CISPA members have always been aggressive in removing illegal content. The Attorney General’s office can verify with local, regional, state and Federal law enforcement agencies the fact that CISPA members have always been at the forefront in pursuing and enabling the prosecution of this type of illegal content.
CISPA members were doing this long before this issue was made a political one, with many being affiliated with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. We have been leaders at the front line of this fight for a long time, alongside and in cooperation with law enforcement.
In contrast, the three ISPs involved in the New York settlement, who are not CISPA members, are being forced to take drastic steps due to their failure to respond to reported illegal content. The root of the problem is that Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable did NOT comply with the law.
CISPA does not believe that similar steps (for example, elimination of Usenet discussion groups) are warranted by other ISPs who have a history of responsiveness. That said, CISPA will encourage our member ISPs to not carry the 88 Usenet groups where illegal content was found, and CISPA will distribute a list of those groups to our members if it is provided to us.
CISPA members are typically community-based ISPs with long and deep histories of working with their communities and believe in an open and free Internet, and we do not believe that broad brush approaches such as elimination of an entire section of the Internet is likely to be the best approach.
CISPA’s position relative to child pornography is that it should not be tolerated in any form and all CISPA members should continue to actively work to reduce and eliminate such content from their networks.
CISPA encourages both the Governor and Attorney General to convene a California Internet Child Safety Committee. CISPA would welcome the opportunity to participate on such a committee.
