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The Net on AOL's Time Warner deal
BY JANELLE BROWN, DAMIEN CAVE and LYDIA LEE
(01/11/00)

When the Fort Worth chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union investigated complaints of censorship and anti-minority hate in user profiles on America Online, AOL's news search engine failed to find a single reference to this nationally reported story. (See Wired Strategies.)

Our public posts in AOL discussion groups seeking information from others censored by AOL resulted in my AOL account being cancelled for "commercial solicitation." AOL's "community action team" told me that I could not receive copies of my own customer records, and I was hung up on.

The thought of AOL chairman Steve Case in charge of Time magazine and CNN is indeed chilling.

-- Frank Provasek
President, ACLU Ft Worth Chapter, Texas

Scott Rosenberg's article was an interesting discussion of the AOL-Time Warner merger. But amid all the talk of "missing the broadband bandwagon" and increasing "market share and power," a much more fundamental question emerges: Why are we handing over the lifeblood of democracy -- information dissemination -- to corporations?

Rosenberg notes that "Corporate media power really is getting scarily concentrated." It's not "getting," but has been concentrated since the downfall of the independent labor press. The Net was developed with taxpayer money within the Pentagon high-tech industry welfare system. That a company like AOL should reap profits by charging for access to a product that the public has already paid for is an absurdity. And for Salon to moan about how companies like AOL are getting too big misses the point -- the truly "scary" thing is that they exist in the first place.

-- Damon Poeter
Bangkok, Thailand

The AOL-Time Warner deal is another brick in the wall of making big business too big for anyone to regulate or stop. When the Exxon/Mobil Oil merger went through I asked myself, How in the name of all that's right will this benefit anyone but the stockholders?

There is an increasing tempo of big mergers, which only concentrate more economic control in fewer hands while reducing price and product competition for consumers. It seems to go almost unnoticed that the resulting huge businesses have a disproportionate effect on government regulators, and government itself through lobbying and the almost unregulated political fund-raising which is rapidly eroding the last vestiges of fairness in our political process.

The SEC and other federal regulators are not being allowed to do their jobs because the political will to allow them to function has been co-opted by the increasingly evil political campaign funding, which threatens to exchange the American oligarchy for a real plutocracy.

-- John Barker

The government should first make AOL clean up its own service before it even considers approving this merger. AOL cannot take care of its own subscribers now. They censor all kinds of speech with their TOS ("Terms of Service"). The spam AOL'ers receive is unreal and many times the amount a person would receive with a normal ISP account.

Try signing up for a free trial period and see how much you get in the first hour you are online. Most of it is for MFM ("Make Money Fast") schemes or for pornography. Then try and cancel and see what happens. This merger can't be good for anyone except Steve Case, the former toothpaste salesman.

-- John Hozian

Well, damn. Many of us who -- for reasons unknown -- still use AOL are getting miserably slow service, with regular bootings. (In AOL's case, "Internet service provider" is almost a malaprop.) So, if AOL buys Time Warner, does that mean my Entertainment Weekly will show up late or not at all, too?

-- Regina Deavitt

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