I was interested to read in The Wall Street Journal of 6 July 2006 an article entitled "You've Got Free Mail? AOL May Give Away Service to Some" by Matthew Karnitschnig.

The article speculates that AOL is about offer broadband subscribers "free" service - in other words no more monthly fees.

Perhaps AOL should hire yours truly as an advisor since I suggested this very strategy (almost to a tee) in a post on December 13, 2005.

Therefore I could not agree more with this decision. It is a sure winner. Otherwise AOL will watch their subscribers go down the drain by the end of this decade.

While I cannot prove it, I theorized on this very problem with a one time securities analyst named Alan Braverman back in 1998. I believe Alan was with Montgomery Securities in those days and I debated with him that AOL was doomed because of the future problem of subscriber loss. Braverman and many other analysts, including Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, never foresaw this problem and of course neither did Time Warner when they gave away a huge part of their company in the 2000 AOL-Time Warner merger.