Prior to that, though AOL offered plenty of its own online content, it walled off the greater Internet. Ultimately the Net itself-which AOL subscribers were finally able to access in 1995- made the service's shortcomings painfully obvious. In August 2005, AOL paid a $1.25 million fine to the state of New York and agreed to change its cancellation policies-but the agreement covered only people in New York. Several states sued the service, claiming that it continued to bill customers after they had requested cancellation of their subscriptions.

Once AOL had you in its clutches, escaping was notoriously difficult. This carpet-bombing technique yielded big numbers: At its peak, AOL claimed 34 million subscribers worldwide, though it never revealed how many were just using up their free hours. In the 90s you couldn't open a magazine (PC World included) or your mailbox without an AOL disk falling out of it. This lethal combination earned the world's biggest ISP the top spot on our list of bottom feeders.ĪOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing techniques. And all the while, AOL remained more expensive than its major competitors. Since America Online emerged from the belly of a BBS called Quantum 'PC-Link' in 1989, users have suffered through awful software, inaccessible dial-up numbers, rapacious marketing, in-your-face advertising, questionable billing practices, inexcusably poor customer service, and enough spam to last a lifetime. How do we loathe AOL? Let us count the ways.

Realnetworks realplayer 1999