America Online is the Microsoft of the Internet service provider world -- the product put out by AOL isn’t very good, but cut-throat business practices and slick marketing have made the company very rich.

Here in the good ol’ U.S., it’s hard to avoid getting one of those blasted CD’s that feature AOL’s browser and about a million hours of free access. My advice is to use that CD for a coaster or, if you’ve got a good shotgun, save up a few of them and use them for skeet. Those thing show up in the mail, wind up bundled with Sunday newspapers or can sometimes be found laying around in offices or on the side of the road. AOL has been sending those things out for years, and I wish to God they’d stop sending them my way. That’s another story, though.

Now, AOL wasn’t always the ever-present menace that it is today. Indeed, AOL has its roots in a little company called Control Video. That firm manufactured a product called the GameLink in the early 1980s, which was a modem that plugged into an Atari 2600. Subscribers could play games on their Atari 2600 downloaded through the modem. Unfortunately, the ’’video game crash’’ of 1984 wiped out may companies, including Control Video.

Sadly, the brilliant minds behind Control Video didn’t go crawl off in the respective corners and lick their wounds. Instead, they wound up inflicting AOL on us.

There are a lot of reasons I hate AOL, and the majority of those come from being suckered into getting an account with that miserable firm a few years ago. I also hate them because my dear mother was tricked into getting a three-year AOL account when she bought her computer and is stuck with that horrible service.

While I haven’t messed with AOL since around 1997, I’ve had to help my mom out with her account, and I’ve learned that not much has changed about the alleged ISP (I’ll explain the ’’alleged’’ part later). If you get suckered into signing up for AOL, you can count on slow access times, a lot of SPAM and customer service that ranks right up there with Miscrosoft’s (ever sent an e-mail griping about Windows or any other Microsoft program? Try it sometime and see the response you’ll get from the curs).

Now, the reason I call AOL an ’’alleged’’ ISP is because the company doesn’t actually own that many servers. Huh? Here’s how it works, according to a friend of mine who works for Arkansas.Net (my local ISP and a damn good company, to boot). AOL rents a lot of server space from local ISPs, and that’s very bad for AOL customers. Let’s say that Arkansas.Net has a spike in activity. Guess who gets kicked off. That’s right -- Arkansas.Net keeps its customers online the best they can, and tells the AOL folks to go to hell.

I also hate the ads on AOL. Whenever you log on, you’re likely to find two things -- little ads trying to push you into buying junk you don’t need pop up on the screen, and you’ve probably got a mailbox full of (you guessed it) more ads. I absolutely hate advertising over the Internet. Call me old-fashioned, but gobs of SPAM in my mailbox and those pop-up ads send just irritate the hell out of me, and my list of blocked addressed in my e-mail client is absolutely massive.

The point is, you’re going to get hammered with SPAM and ads whenever you get on the Internet, so why the hell would you go out and pay $24 a month to a company that’s going to send even more of that junk your way? It makes no sense to me.

To make matters worse, the AOL browser is absolutely horrible. While Microsoft and Netscape went to great pains to make sure their browsers complied with some kind of uniform standard, AOL doesn’t give a damn what the rest of the world does -- it’s got it’s own standard and will, by God, stick with that no matter what. This means that some Web sites can’t be accessed by AOL customers, while other sites go to great lenghts to make allowances for those poor saps using AOL. And this company is the dominant ISP? That makes absolutely no sense.

Well, it doesn’t make sense if you don’t pay attention to the pack of lies AOL calls a marketing campaign. The company claims it prides itself in easy and fast access, great customer service and other such rot. None of that’s true, of course, but the ads look pretty convincing. Don’t believe a word of them.

Finally, if there is one thing good about AOL, it’s the ’’community’’ that users can join when they get an account through the company. AOL does try to make sure that chat rooms are easy to find and provides for online gaming and such. Instant messaging is available, and that allows folks to stay in touch.

However, why not just get a local, reliable ISP, and get access to a similar community through a free account at Yahoo! or another freebie, huge site? Yahoo! offers similar features, and helps the Internet newbie get up and going through a very simple search engine and links to all sorts of useful items such as fantasy sports, business news and etc. That makes sense to me, at least.

While I’ve always hoped Americans would wake up and get rid of AOL, I realize that the company’s superb marketing and domination of the ISP industry will prevent that from happening anytime soon.

Purchase Price (INR):

$24.00 (U.S.)