Word: aol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...year 2004, you heard 'N SYNC was playing Bat Mitzvahs, you'd probably think things were right on schedule. But last weekend the boys gigged at Temple Beth Sholom in Potomac, Md., to honor Rachel Colburn, whose father happens to be a high-ranking AOL exec with connections to the band. Three hundred surprised guests were treated to a 40-minute set of hits, including Bye Bye Bye and Tearin' Up My Heart. Hava Nagila remixes should be bootlegged...
...such as Microsoft, Tribal Voice and Odigo (blocked, Odigo says, six times in the past two weeks) access to its teeming Instant Messaging network, the online giant floated a proposal that would throw open the doors. Politically, the proposal is perfect for softening the scowl of trustbusters eyeing the AOL-Time Warner merger, and it's also very handy technically in that it doesn't offer any details whatsoever on how outside linkups would be allowed. That, according to AOL, is a security issue, and the company left it to the Internet Engineering Task Force to work out how standards...
...AOL has some justification for dragging its feet. Open access, it argues, could lead to hacking and - gasp! - spamming, and it rightly assumes that one of the things its 90 million registered users (who exchange 651 million messages a day) cherish about IM is that it's unadulterated by the viral threats and cybercrap that litter their traditional e-mail accounts. AOL's proposal, besides being in the play-nice-with-Washington mold that Microsoft eschewed to its peril, has the added advantage of being utterly theoretical for the foreseeable future. Said IETF co-chairman Vijay Saraswat, whose group...
...tech behemoth should act. Lesson 1, according to Wednesday's Wall Street Journal: Instant Messaging, the real-time, buddy-listed way to chat online that's more popular with teenagers than 'N Sync and is widely expected to be next frontier of all things e-. AOL owns 90 percent of the 150-million-strong IM market and, more important, has continually thwarted attempts by Microsoft and other small IM players to tap into its system and reach its users. TIME Silicon Valley correspondent Chris Taylor says that's just the kind of piggish, anti-spirit-of-the-Net behavior that...
...specifically is not a strong antitrust case, because AOL doesn't own any exclusive means of transmitting the messages, or leverage its service against anything else. It's just overwhelmingly popular," he says. "But if the feds are going to allow AOL to own Time Warner's cable lines, they want assurances that AOL won't turn them into an exclusive carrier of AOL content. And the company's use of its IM domination isn't very reassuring." AOL isn't a monopolist now, and AOL-Time Warner would be no more of a cable monopoly than Time Warner (corporate...