AOL Gets Free Rein on IM Services.The US Federal Communications Commission Federal Communications Commission (FCC), independent executive agency of the U.S. government established in 1934 to regulate interstate and foreign communications in the public interest. , throwing out its earlier ruling, has decided to allow AOL (A division of Time Warner, Inc., New York, NY, www.aol.com) The world's largest online information service with access to the Internet, e-mail, chat rooms and a variety of databases and services. Time Warner Inc to offer advanced instant messaging Exchanging text messages in real time between two or more people logged into a particular instant messaging (IM) service. Instant messaging is more interactive than e-mail because messages are sent immediately, whereas e-mail messages can be queued up in a mail server for seconds or services without first requiring it to commit to interoperability. In a 3-2 vote, split long party lines, the FCC (1) (Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, www.fcc.gov) The U.S. government agency that regulates interstate and international communications including wire, cable, radio, TV and satellite. The FCC was created under the U.S. lifted conditions that obliged AOL to interoperate with two other IM providers before it could offer so-called "advanced IM-based high-speed services" such as presence-aware videoconferencing A real time video session between two or more users or between two or more locations. Although the first videoconferencing was done with traditional analog TV and satellites, inhouse room systems became popular in the early 1980s after Compression Labs pioneered digitized video systems . The rules were imposed as part of the FCC's approval of the AOL Time Warner merger in January 2001, in response to fears from consumer groups and rivals that the combination of AOL's online services and Time Warner broadband could damage competition. FCC chair Michael Powell who in 2001, as a lowly Commissioner on a Democratic-tilted panel, had strongly opposed and dissented from the AIHS AIHS Academy for International Health Studies AIHS Alexis I Dupont High School (Greenville, Delaware) conditions in 2001, took the opportunity this week to show his views as being vindicated. "The fact that AOL Time Warner's market share is decreasing in a growing market, combined with the fact that two non-trivial competitors - Microsoft and Yahoo - have established stable and growing market shares, directly contravenes the theory that the market is tipping toward AOL," he said in a statement. AOL, in its petition to have the AIHS conditions dropped filed with the FCC in April, cited comScore Networks metrics and said its market share had dropped from 100% in 1999 to 61.5% at the time of the merger and about 58.5% in February 2003. Dissenting this time, Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein pointed out that 59% or thereabouts there·a·bouts also there·a·bout adv. 1. Near that place; about there: somewhere in Kansas or thereabouts. 2. About that number, amount, or time. is still "dominant" and that AOL still has more instant messaging users than all its competitors combined. "Today, as in 2001, AOL Time Warner is the market leader in IM services... any removal of the condition is premature and unwarranted," the dissenting commissioners said in a joint statement. Copps and Adelstein point out that AOL has only recently started to heavily promote its broadband services. They also express concern about how the FCC's ruling will affect the potential for interoperable IM, as well as cross-network IM services, such as those offered by Trillian Inc. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion