Word: aol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Mario Monti doesn't necessarily hate America. The European Union's Competition Commissioner, the Joel Klein of the Continent, is Italian, after all, not French. But this week his commission moved to block the WorldCom-Sprint deal and launched an investigation into AOL-Time Warner (parent of this site), and in the past year it has started similar probes into deals by Boeing and Microsoft. Could Monti's evident distaste for American corporate marriages be less about antitrust law than geopolitics...
...Certainly, Europe's politicians and business leaders aren't complaining about Monti's moves against the high-tech mergers. To a continent still following America's lead on all things connected (except for cell phones), the threat of WorldCom or AOL owning too much of Europe's Internet plumbing is practically a matter of national security, or at least of national pride. It's worse than McDonald's, Coke and Nike all rolled into one, because even the Europeans know that high-tech telecom is the future of the world economy, and they're determined that globalization not mean - sacre...
...Microsoft case was about the platform of the 1990s--Windows. The risk that AOL presents is to the platform of the 21st century--the Internet. In both cases, the question is whether a strategic actor can chill innovation. With the Internet, that answer depends upon the principles built into...
...AOL promises it will behave. It has been a strong defender of "open access" in the past. But its promises are not binding, its slowness in allowing other instant-messaging services onto its platform is troubling, and last month's squabble over access to ABC on Time Warner's network is positively chilling. These are not signs that the principle that built the Internet thrives...
...test will be whether AOL sticks to the principle of e2e, and if it doesn't, whether the government will understand enough to defend the principle in response. If AOL respects e2e in broadband, if it keeps the platform of the network neutral among new uses, if it builds a guarantee into its architecture that innovation will be allowed and encouraged, then we should not worry so much about what AOL owns. Only when it tries to own (through architecture) the right to innovate should we worry...