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Originally Posted by peter eldergill
I thought AOL was the worst offender by far in this respect...can someone tell me about what AOL does? I heard it's not actually the web, but their own little world, with only approved sites and so on...Is that true? Personally , I don't care for AOL's advertising methods and would never use them as an ISP
Pete
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What AOL does is charge people more for service that is of a lower quality than real ISPs.
It started back in the 1980s, when home-accessible networks were being developed outside of ARPANet. Others of this ilk were Prodigy and CompuServe.
When the net was opened up in 1995, these providers managed to hang on by claiming special content and services. An aggressive and often deceptive advertising campaign by AOL, banking on the general ignorance of the American public about the WWW in particular and computers in general, paid off.
What was really hilarious about these three was during 1995, before they became de facto ISPs, they claimed to provide a user with "net access", but only to their own proprietary domains, which were inaccessible to non-AOL, etc., net surfers.
Why AOL is still is business was best described by H.L. Mencken many years ago,
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No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
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