Last week NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made a big deal out of the fact that he'd managed to get AOL to stop offering access to child porn newsgroups. The only thing was, AOL stopped offering newsgroup access three years ago to cut costs, so nothing has actually changed and even AOL admits they're not doing a single thing differently.

Remember, this all began last month when the AG's office conducted a "sting" against Time Warner Cable, Sprint and Verizon -- and found that one could find some fairly disgusting things via newsgroups. Despite the fact that I'd heard weeks earlier that Time Warner Cable was considering dumping newsgroups for financial reasons, that decision was also wrapped into the broader NY AG's announcement as part of his plan.

So several ISPs cut newsgroups access, but most of them either already had or were planning to as cost savings moves. The other half of the agreement involves quickly taking offending child porn material off of their servers when alerted, something they were also already doing. So what did the NY AG's office actually accomplish (other than get a politician's name in lights)?