I never used AOL, although I have seen it used by way too many people. My first ISP was Compuserve, which is just as bad.
All I want from an ISP is a decent spec (low latencies, fast transfer rates, no transfer limits), and low cost internet connection. I am perfectly capable of setting up internet explorer, outlook express, mirc, or any of the hundreds of clients which I should be able to choose from. ISPs should adhere to widely accepted standards and specifications. Any OS can support PPP/PPPoE or whatever.
I remember with compuserve, I couldnt set up a handheld to connect, as they forced me to use their own proprietry dialer. I could not access my mailbox via POP3/set up a webmail script/whatever, as I had to use their own crappy proprietory client. The only reason they were able to get away with offering an inferior service is because they were widely known and just as big as AOL at the time.
Their marketting strategy is simply spamming peoples doorsteps with CD after CD of their crap. The average person who wants to try out the 'Internet' doesn't understand anything about open standards, or anything about choosing ISPs, so they go for the one which they happen to have 20 disks from in their bins, or software preinstalled on the computer the purchased from dell/gateway.
Once people have a email address from their ISP, which all their contacts know, once they have set up an established homepage address, even when they realise what a POS the ISP is, they will be reluctant to change ISPs. I was in the same position - changing email addresses would be a disaster, especially as I used it for business and having mail from potential customers bounces wasn't a good idea. I have learned my lesson, if you use an ISP, just use it for intenret access - host email at your own domain, or on reliable free DNS/domain service, same with webhosting.
AOL can brag about their excellent service with built in chat, mail, and censorship. What new internet users do not realise is that all this can be done at no cost through thousands of different software tools. New users believe the 'Internet' is synnonomous with 'AOL'.
their parental control features they push so heavily is a joke, it's way too easy to circumvent if you know what you're doing
Perhaps slightly off topic, but that 'problem' isn't going to be relevant to just AOL. The internet by design is a free and democratic medium for data exchange. Data can be transmitted to any host, it can be encrypted, it can be sent through a proxy with the URL scrambled. It will never be possible to censor the internet beyond very simple and ineffective filters which can be easilly bypassed by anyone with basic knowledge of the internets working - and that's the entire beauty of the internet. That's why attempts by communist governments to set up national filtering firewalls have always failed. 'Protecting' users from freedom of information, and all its 'filth' is no substitute for good education about ethics and morality. And my ethics go strongly against any form of censorship.
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