Yahoo after the bell 6-27-06: Cooperating to combat child pornography

On a day when the Nasdaq shed 1.57%, Yahoo! Inc. stock's decline of 14 cents (0.13%), wasn't so bad.  Yahoo closed at $31.51.

The big news item in the industry today regarding Google introducing its online payment system, GBuy, as early as tomorrow, had little impact on Yahoo!
Similarly, Hindery's prediction that four out of the five portals, Yahoo among the five, will not survive, didn't affect the stock much either.

In fact, some of the focus today was turned to Yahoo's effort to combat child pornography online. Yahoo! Inc is among a group of Internet companies that includes AOL, Microsoft Corp, Earthlink and United Online. At first, the group plans "to pay $1 million for a new project of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that will develop systems meant to help identify child exploitation on the Internet and refer cases to law enforcement".

The next step is for the group to share electronic signatures of suspected images, allowing more images to be identified, thus referring the senders for prosecution.

Not by chance, today a House subcommittee began to look at how Internet service providers and social networking sites are used by child pornographers. Despite the above mentioned effort by the Internet companies, the companies object to some demands by the subcommittee to keep records and emails up to two years.

Google Inc was invited to join the cooperative, but so far hadn't.