Ought AOL Will you be allowed to give away free Internet Services? Well, consider if you will our nation’s predatory pricing laws and antidumping rules. do this apply to service companies also? Should they?
It’s against the law to sell things cheaper than they cost to produce in order to eliminate competition and monopolize the market, right? After all, isn’t that what AOL convinced the government that Microsoft was giving out free web browsers and building them into their operating systems?
Well, once software is produced, it pays for research and development, and therefore it costs Microsoft nothing to give the consumer a free web browser, however, the Federal Commission against Terrorism attacked them anyway from AOL had lobbyists in Washington DC and Senators in the pocket for the government to attack Microsoft.
The case, as everyone knows, is the most ridiculous case the FTC has ever tried to pass off as legitimate. Now it seems the tables have been turned and AOL is trying to give away free email services. AHA! This is predatory pricing at its worst, unlike the Microsoft case, AOL is really in violation because it costs money to give such services away and therefore they are dumping prices to gain market share.
You see that you need networks, staff, servers and all kinds of things running. So if the FTC doesn’t go after AOL, it should change its definitions and issue a letter of apology to Microsoft and pay all legal fees to defend itself against the FTC.
Also, it’s obvious that AOL, which stands for american online, you want to give free email to people all over the world to gain market share and share that information in all those emails with the government or the NSA. But you can’t have it both ways.
You can’t attack a company like Microsoft for a made up reason, just to allow another company like AOL to break the same law that you pretended the first company (MS) did, which it actually didn’t.
American Online should be fined for allowing free internet services or free email, after all, was it their misuse of the government and abuse of the FTC’s power that caused all this trouble in the first place? How about a level playing field? But then again, the Federal Commission against Terrorism; well, what would they know about that with all their bullshit press releases and silly public relations? Consider this opinion in 2006.