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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chadick who wrote (5826)	2/26/1999 12:45:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 41369

AOL has no comment on AT&T report By Reuters Special to CNET News.com February 26, 1999, 7:20 a.m. PT America Online, the leading supplier of Internet services, declined to comment today on a report it was rumored once again to be a possible takeover target of telecommunications giant AT&T. "We don't comment on rumors and speculation," an AOL spokeswoman said. The Inside Wall Street column in the March 8 issue of Business Week magazine reported that rumors on Wall Street suggested that AOL "may well be the target of the likes of AT&T for a merger of near-equals." "But analysts think AOL's huge market capitalization of $83.5 billion would deter any potential partner," the report said. The rumors revive year-old speculation that AT&T and AOL were considering a merger--rumors that predated AT&T's blockbuster merger deal with Tele-Communications Incorporated. However, more recently, AOL had campaigned U.S. regulators, seeking to force the AT&T-TCI combination to open TCI's closed cable networks to potentially competing suppliers of high-speed Internet access, such as AOL. U.S. officials declined to act on the proposal, and the ATT-TCI merger was approved earlier this month. Any ATT-AOL deal also would conflict with AOL's growing ties with AT&T rival, MCI WorldCom, which supplies a majority of AOL's Internet access network capacity, and which uses AOL programming in a new MCI Internet access service. Story Copyright © 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.