AOL director "worried" in 2000 about transactions
495498
Former AOL Time Warner Chairman  Steve Case learned as early as 2000 about transactions that  allowed the company to overstate revenues ahead of its merger  with Time Warner, according to court documents unsealed on  Friday.
150321
America Online, the internet division of Time Warner, will be charged with criminal securities fraud but is likely to avoid prosecution under a settlement
175188
AOL co-founder Steve Case has offered a qualified apology for his role in architecting the online company's disastrous combination with Time Warner Inc.
506859
The chairman of the Senate's antitrust panel is uneasy about Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick and says it should be scrutinized very closely.
54993
The liquidator of Access Brokerage believes client money may have been propping up the business for some time. The small Internet broker collapsed on Friday, with a $5 million shortfall in its client trust accounts.
452676
Officials in India's technology industry expressed anger and concern over the jailing of the CEO of eBay's Indian subsidiary related to the online sale of a sex video. The U.S. State Department has also made inquiries about the case.
326695
Company exec's post-launch spiel published too soon, it seems
732413
(InfoWorld) - Ted Leonsis, one of AOL's top leaders in the past 13 years, will shed his day-to-day management duties in January, but will remain vice chairman of the Dulles, Virginia, Web portal and Internet services provider. Leonsis is seen as having a steady hand in keeping AOL afloat during rough times and for envisioning and implementing dramatic strategic changes. By retaining his vice chairman role, he will continue to be "a strategist and visionary for AOL" and a mentor to executives, AOL said in a statement Friday. He steps away from active management at a critical time for AOL, as the Time Warner subsidiary continues to morph into anÂ advertising-drivenÂ Web portalÂ and moves away from its subscription-based Internet access model. This shift, in the works for years, began in earnest in mid-2005 and got its biggest public boost last month when AOL announced it wouldÂ provide for freeÂ practically all of its content and services. Viewed as a bold jump without a net, this decision will accelerate the shrinking of AOL's Internet access business, whose subscription rolls have been deflating for several years. It remains to be seen if the advertising revenue will grow enough to justify the gamble. As president of AOL's Audience business, Leonsis oversees AOL's advertising operations, whose success is mandatory for the company to survive and thrive. He will relinquish this role effective Jan. 1, 2007. Already, AOL announced its intention toÂ slash up to 5,000 jobsÂ worldwide, or just over a quarter of its workforce, anticipating the shrinkage of its access business. As if the dramatic business-model shift wasn't enough of a challenge, AOL executives have had to wipe a lot of pie from their faces in recent months due to a series of disconcerting bungles. The most serious one was the public release last month of about 20 million search records from about 658,000 of its members. AÂ storm of criticism hit AOLÂ over this faux pas, which the company acknowledged was a lapse in judgment. Although AOL didn't disclose member names, it grouped each person's records with a unique number, making it possible to see what each individual searched for. The data included search queries, as well as Web sites the members clicked on. In June and July, the company faced a public relations nightmare after a member called AOL to cancel his subscription and the customer service representative resisted in disrespectful ways. The member posted a recording of the call on his blog. It ignited such a firestorm that the story got picked up by news outlets. Last month, StopBadware.org labeled the AOL 9.0 desktop software application as "badware," because, among other things, it installs additional software without informing users and forces them to take certain actions. In this context, Leonsis has decided he wants to devote more time to other pursuits in which he is already involved, like ownership of professional sports teams, filmmaking, philanthropy and venture capital investing. Leonsis joined AOL in 1993, when AOL acquired Redgate Communications, a digital marketing company he founded. "AOL is in great hands, and it is absolutely on the right path,â Leonsis said in Friday's statement.
444849
AOL's new 9.0 Security Edition seems intended to burnish the online service's reputation as the crossing guard of the Internet, but that's a goal that this release can't quite achieve. -Rob Pegoraro
4156
When Chris Marentis joined America Online Inc. 10 years ago, the fledgling Internet empire was growing at a frenzied pace. As senior vice president of business development, he worked 60-hour weeks and spent holidays closing multimillion-dollar deals. He held strategy meetings by trading instant...
413863
AOL said in a statement that its previous decision against Sender ID was made because the first version was not backwards compatible, meaning that &quot;all of the development work AOL and many others
152648
For the most part, AOL's future plans are the same old story.
2935
America Online&#39;s accounting practices are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.
767744
AOL has settled with 48 states and the District of Columbia over an investigation stemming from its previous cancellation policies in which some customers were unable to close their AOL accounts, or found themselves being billed for services after thinking they had canceled.
625686
(InfoWorld) - Asian regulators should think twice about followingÂ the U.S. lead on net neutrality, or risk undermining the economic incentive for Asian carriers to build and maintain faster networks, according to speakers at the CommunicAsia Summit in Singapore. Regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore show signs of enshrining a policy of net neutrality for future networks, and that's not necessarily a positive development, said Peter Waters, a partner at law firm Gilbert+Tobin. Net neutrality is a term for policies that prevent carriers from giving preference on their networks to traffic from their own sites, or charging Web sites extra for preferential treatment. "We need to back off a bit," Waters said. Regulators should wait until a problem arises before stepping in to set new policies, he said. Waters and others speaking at CommunicAsia argued that carriers must be able to collect revenue for the different types of content that crosses their networks. Asia Netcom, which operates a backhaul network in Asia, claimed the right to charge content providers for the data carried on its network, particularly when that data is valuable. For example, Google and others use Asia Netcom's network to transmit advertisements and other content that have significant value. "Why do I keep providing that [service] for free?" said Mark Simpson, the company's chief operating officer. Waters proposed a revenue-sharing model, where backhaul carriers receive a portion of the revenue from content providers for the data carried on their networks. Net neutrality is a contentious issue and is generallyÂ opposed by carriers, who argue it reduces the incentive to build new networks. However, in March, researchers at the University of Florida conducted a study using game theory analysis that found the opposite to be true. Allowing carriers to charge content providers for the data they carry provides less incentive for the carriers to expand and improve their networks, they found. "The incentive for the broadband service provider to expand under net neutrality is unambiguously higher than when the principle of net neutrality is abandoned," the researchers wrote in the conclusion of their report. Â
6532
U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)&#160;Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras won&#39;t recuse herself from considering the antitrust implications of&#160;Google&#39;s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, despite a request from two privacy groups that she do so.Majoras, in a statement Friday, said&#160;the request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD)&#160;contains &quot;key factual errors.&quot; The two groups filed a petition Wednesday saying Majoras&#39; husband works for a law firm that is advising DoubleClick on the merger before U.S. and European regulators.The Web site for John Majoras&#39; law firm, Jones Day, at one point said it was representing DoubleClick &quot;on the international and U.S. antitrust and competition law aspects&quot; of the Google merger. But Platt Majoras said in her statement that Jones Day has never contacted the FTC about DoubleClick and that she didn&#39;t know it was representing DoubleClick in Europe until earlier this week.A second FTC commissioner whose wife also works for Jones Day also said he won&#39;t recuse himself.The EPIC and CDD petition also is incorrect when it says that John Majoras is an equity partner in Jones Day, Platt Majoras said. John Majoras switched his partnership from equity to nonequity status in January 2006, she said.&quot;I understand that as a fixed-participation partner, his compensation will not be increased or affected by changes in the firm&#8217;s income,&quot; Platt Majoras said.&quot;My husband does not represent any party in the Google-DoubleClick matter. He is in no way connected to the matter, nor are any of the parties to the matter otherwise currently his clients.&quot;EPIC and CDD, in a joint statement, said the FTC has &quot;failed utterly&quot; in its procedures to alert Platt Majoras about potential conflicts of interest. Despite Platt Majoras&#39; claims that she doesn&#39;t have a conflict, John Majoras is an antitrust expert at Jones Day, and one of his key responsibilities is business development in Washington, D.C., they said.Platt Majoras &quot;simply sets out the conclusion that the interests in her participation in this matter outweigh the potential conflict without providing any of the relevant factors that support that conclusion other than that she is the chairman of the commission,&quot; said the statement from EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg and CDD executive director Jeffrey Chester.Jones Day changed its Web site&#160;after the groups pointed out that it said the firm was representing DoubleClick on U.S. antitrust matters, wrote Rotenberg and Chester.&quot;The logical conclusion is that Jones Day ... sought to destroy the relevant evidence,&quot; Rotenberg and Chester wrote.A Jones Day spokesman didn&#39;t immediately have a comment when asked about the EPIC and CDD allegations.Google in April announced plans to acquire ad-serving giant DoubleClick in a $3.1 billion deal. That same month, EPIC, CDD and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) filed a petition asking the FTC to block the deal unless Google made significant changes to its privacy policy. The groups argued that the combined company would have unparalleled access to Web users&#39; personal information.FTC Commissioner William Kovacic also noted, in a Friday statement, that his wife, Kathryn Fenton, is a nonequity partner at Jones Day. The EPIC and CDD petition had not sought to have Kovacic recused.The FTC&#39;s three other commissioners, Pamela Jones Harbour, Jon Leibowitz and J. Thomas Rosch, issued a joint statement, saying that they agreed with the decisions of Platt Majoras and Kovacic not to recuse themselves.&quot;It is evident that these commissioners have at all times taken affirmative steps to conduct themselves in complete conformity with the ethical standards that apply to their positions,&quot; the three said.
645535
The attorney general's request that banks send spam to warn of phishing has some befuddled.