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

To: Jon Stept who wrote (15695)	5/7/1999 3:03:00 PM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

Jon, you are right. The problem is this. Right now, if I pick up my telephone, I get a dial tone from my local phone provider, who charges me for accessing their lines (whether by call or monthly). If my call goes outside their lines, long distance, I then have a choice of who to route that call and who to pay for that service. Suppose, however, that when I picked up the phone I had to pay T for the dial tone, then pay T for routing that call either locally or anywhere in the world? If so, they could charge me whatever they wanted to, and drive every other phone company out of business. That is what led to their breakup. But some say this is about the internet, not about telephone service. Well, don't kid yourselves, what T really knows, and what they want, is to monopolize the phone business once more by merging VoIP phone calls with internet and digital TV service over cable lines. What about internet service? This gets a bit cloudier. Right now, we have freedom of choice as to what ISP to use. The ISP plays the role of the local provider, and from there we can go anywhere else in the internet. Under T's vision, we would lose choice as to ISP, it would be ATHM. Now, once we went into ATHM, we could obviously go anywhere else, including AOL. The problem is that AOL has a proprietary system, and to log on and use their content we would have to pay twice, once for ATHM and once for AOL. Is that a bad thing? Right now I honestly don't know. AOL might become like the HBO of cable, a value-added service. Or people might choose to stay with AOL because of their content and community. It seems to me that eventually a deal will be struck, and AOL will be bundled in with ATHM, YHOO, and a bunch of other services. That would make economic sense for T. But then, a monopoly does not always think in common sense terms. JMHO, and not worth much, certainly not worth national press.