Title: You WILL be assimilated
Random link o' the day: Handspring
Visors
Today's scary news: AOL is buying Time Warner for $181 billion (that's with a "B") dollars. Eek. This is starting to scare me. AOL owns Compuserve now, and Time Warner, of course, owns CNN; Warner Bros.; Time, Inc.; and HBO. The comments on Slashdot can best be summed up as: "Oh SHIT. This is SCARY."
I'm not sure what to think just yet. As a rule, I am extremely distrustful of Very Very Very Big Corporations(tm), because people with lots of power are bad to get corrupted by it. That being said, here's my take, however uneducated it may be so far.
This is the biggest and baddest merger in history, and what's record-setting about it just aside from that is that it's between an on-line company and a traditional media outlet. AOL and TW fill in each other's gaps... TW brings in cable modem service; AOL gives TW a big-time foothold on the Internet (or AOL's version of it, anyway). This is, in short, becoming the single biggest and most powerful media company in the world. And THAT'S why it scares me.
I'm a firm believer in capitalism. Competition is GOOD. There's a reason huge, unwieldy companies draw my suspicion. AOL is now going to control a large portion of broadband services (RoadRunner, specifically). If their service there is as shoddy as for their regular dial-up, we're all in trouble.
Plus, I'm just not looking forward to the increased spam and AOL CD's that are going to flood us anew.
I don't like AOL. I don't trust them one bit. Let's hope buying Time Warner doesn't make them any more evil than they already are. Steve Case, kiss my ass.
Ian said, "We're going to get James Earl Jones going, 'This... is AOL.'" God, I hope not.
-- marcie.