"Protecting the safety of our children must be a top priority, not just for government, but also for businesses with the direct power to reduce the ability to conduct illegal activity," Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown said in a statement sent to the California Internet Service Provider Association, an organization responsible for representing more than a hundred ISPs operating in California.

The California Internet Service Provider Association is the largest ISP industry organization in the nation, and is expected to respond later this week or early next week.

In early June, Time Warner, Sprint, and Verizon came to an agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to purge their servers and help eliminate access to newsgroups that hosted child pornography.  Each ISP mentioned they would make the block nationwide, branching out from New York state alone.

ISPs may elect to eliminate user access to all newsgroups, which may be a cause for concern from the American Civil Liberties Union which could claim it's a violation of free speech to effectively put a blanket ban on Usenet newsgroups.

Time Warner Cable will eliminate the ability for all of its subscribers in the U.S. to have access to any newsgroup.  Sprint also will disallow access to alt.* Usenet newsgroups immediately.  Verizon is going to eliminate access to a variety of newgroups, but did not specify which ones.

"We applaud three of the world's largest Internet service providers-Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint-for taking steps to block access to child pornography. It is not enough, however, for only a few internet service providers to join the fight against online predators. Child pornography is not protected by the First Amendment, and distributing this material is illegal."

The larger ISPs typically have internal rules they follow when child porn is found on a server they host.  

Google will lend a hand by helping develop a new software suite for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that will use facial recognition technology to identify possible missing children in photos and videos on the internet.  To date, Google has already viewed 15 million different images, averaging almost 200,000 scanned images per week.