FC: Feds probe AOL instant messaging service for antitrust violations

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

[So now we have probes of AOL, eBay, Cisco, real estate and airline web 
sites, and of course Intel and Microsoft. Am I missing anything? --Declan]

**********

From: "John F. McMullen" <johnmac@acm.org>
Subject: Anti-Trust Out of Control?
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2000 10:40:59 -0400

 From the Wall Street Journal - Am I missing something or is this just plain
silly - a total lack of understanding by the FTC? One does have to be an AOL
subscriber to use either AIM or ICQ (I'm not). It seems to me that it would
be still be fine if one did have to be - it would be a feature of a system
in competition with other services such as MSN - but the fact that one does
not have to be a subscriber to use it makes me think that THESE GUYS JUST
DON"T GET IT.

Although it does bother me that some really neat software that I saw running
on a Palm VII won't run on my TRS-80 - does that sound like something for
the FTC?

June 14, 2000 	[NL]
Antitrust Concerns Spur FTC To Probe AOL's Instant Messaging
By JOHN R. WILKE and NICK WINGFIELD
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- Federal antitrust enforcers are examining America Online
Inc.'s dominance of popular instant-messaging services as part of their
review of AOL's $113 billion buyout of Time Warner Inc., lawyers and
industry executives said.
Federal Trade Commission investigators have asked for documents and
scheduled depositions with AOL and its competitors in instant messaging, as
one of several issues under review in the deal, these people said. AOL's
Instant Messenger and ICQ are among the most popular services on the Web,
with millions of users sending more than a billion messages a day -- many of
them young people who spend hours a day online.
AOL, based in Dulles, Va., has more than 150 million chatting accounts and,
by some estimates, controls 90% of the instant-messaging market. "It's the
only reason I use America Online," says Taylor Caprio, a 20-year-old New
Jersey college student. "One of my friends doesn't have it and she's always
out of the loop."
Because of AOL's wide lead, instant messaging has become one of the Net's
most high-profile battlegrounds. The conflict is fueled by AOL's
longstanding efforts to prevent competitors, including Microsoft Corp., from
connecting their networks with ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. Instant
messaging is the rare market in which Microsoft finds itself the underdog.
Today, AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ are closed systems that allow only
registered users to communicate with each other; AOL doesn't even allow AOL
Instant Messenger and ICQ users to swap messages yet. Competitors charge
that the scenario is rather like an AT&T Corp. long-distance customer being
able to call only other AT&T customers.
"This is no different than e-mail, telephone or the postal service," says
Ross Bagully, chief executive officer of Tribal Voice, a unit of Internet
investment firm CMGI Inc. that has about eight million users for its own
instant-messaging product. "We want to be able to communicate with
everybody."

[...]

Just this week, another
competitor, Odigo Inc. (www.odigo.com), which has 750,000 users of its own
instant-messaging product, was blocked by AOL.

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