The group of online heavyweights announced this week that they are partnering with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help fight the dissemination of child porn on the Internet.

Their principal objectives include developing a centralized database for images of child porn and creating new technologies that can detect and disrupt the distribution of such material.

In addition, the companies said they will work on improving the tools used for law-enforcement efforts and understanding the strategies child predators use to exploit children online.

Database Problems

While the new initiative has been widely applauded by those fighting child porn, some industry experts have expressed concern.

They say that that, in reality, it is going to take a major amount of resources -- much more than the $1 million initially promised by the five companies -- and a more unified, industry-wide effort to have any kind of measurable effect.

Seth Shoen, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, expressed concern about the accuracy of the database that the five companies will be developing and whether it will be able to distinguish, for instance, between a picture of a real child and an image that looks like a child.

"There is a question about who is making determination of what's child porn in the database," Shoen said. "The database still sounds nonspecific and so is still difficult to evaluate."

False Alarms?

Mukul Krishna, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, offered a similar take, noting that tech companies will face challenges in taking a scientific approach to the image-recognition system at the core of the database effort.

For instance, he noted, if a family is exchanging innocent pictures of a baby having a first bath, the technology will have to be able to differentiate those images from child porn.

"There are going to be a lot of false alarms," Krisha said. "It's going to require a lot of resources to update databases. The companies need to make people aware and make them understand what they are doing."

Krishna also said one of the challenges that these companies will face is defining what child porn is, especially because laws differ from state to state. Many cases will end up going to court, he noted, but they will get stuck there.

In addition, he said, tracking the images in a massive database ultimately will raise privacy concerns. He did say that the initiative is a step in the right direction. "But in a nutshell," he said, "it means a lot of work."