Well first let me start of this rant by telling you that I am a firm AOL hate monger. Now I did not arrive at this opinion by mere chance, I have been for 4 years (and still am) an AOL customer. The reasons why I hate AOL are many and varied, and for those of you that care, I will dispense these reasons here in just a sec. For those of you that are wondering why I still maintain an AOL account, my brother, sister, and father, all still use it. Why they choose to use AOL over a local ISP is beyond me. They probably still use it because it requires less cerebral brain functions to use. The idea of using an ISP dial-up connection and seperate applications such as ICQ for chat, seperate FTP programs, and Netscape as a browser still appall them. Not to mention they have to use a seperate program for email, this takes the cake, they absolutely hate the idea. So all of this boils down to the fact that if you are terminaly stupid, or computer illiterate, you end up being forced to use AOL. What really turned me off about AOL, and caused me to stop using it about 3 months ago is the way the service has been perverted over the years. I mean I remember when the online games available on AOL used to be free. They now charge you an hourly rate in addition to your 20$ a month fee to play online games. I also remember when I could check my email and not have to delete 100 advertisments for anything from porn to bank accounts. Not to mention that you cannot even be online for more than 10 minutes without some pervert trying to send you their picture with those famous words "want to cyber?" I mean come on people! AOL sucks! Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that half the time when using AOL I cannot even get online to torture myself with thier crappy service becuase the access numbers are almost always busy or broken, and they don't ever seen to be in any hurry about fixing them, so what if they lose a few hundred customers when they have millions.

Well now on to what is really bothering me. It seems that recently AOL has decided to purchase Netscape! Now.... I am no economics major, and I don't know much about monopolies but everyone should stop chewing on Microsoft's ass and look at AOL. They bought out Netscape, and now they are after ICQ. For those of you that are still AOL dependant, or don't konw, ICQ is what people who don't have AOL use to chat. Everyone that uses ICQ is now afraid that AOL will start charging them for the use of the program. Previously ICQ was a way to get away from the tyranical iron fisted rule of the AOL corporate monster, but now where can we run now that they have invaded the last bastion of resistance that was holding out against the AOL juggernaut. What if AOL starts charging an hourly rate for ICQ use, like they did to their online games. Or what if they change ICQ so that you can only use it while connected to AOL. This could take millions of ICQ users off of the real internet and thier ISP's back into the pockets of the computer industry's next great monopoly! Down with AOL, fight the power, hey Steve Case, ever hear of antitrust laws?