“Here’s my message to the Federal Trade Commission: IT’S ABOUT
TIME! It’s about time you investigate the stranglehold America
Online has on the instant messaging market. It’s about time you
gave Steve Case and company grief about the proprietary game their
playing.”
“Instant messaging is the communication software that allows
users to create private chat rooms and exchange nearly real-time
messages. There’s no standard for the service now, although AOL’s
AIM and ICQ instant-messaging services could amount to one with an
estimated 90% of the market and 150 million chatting accounts. But
they are closed systems. You don’t have access unless you pay the
AOL monopoly tax. AOL now pays only lip service to efforts to
create an instant-messaging standard. And it continues to
out-and-out block non-AOL users from exchanging instant messages
with AOL users. … I say the feds should do more than
investigate.”
“It took the feds 10 years to finally confront the Redmond
bully. By that time, Microsoft had ruthlessly squashed who knows
how many companies. Let’s not give AOL the chance to do the
same.”