AOL to buy Huffington Post for $315M.....WTF?

[marxthespot_]

First it was News Corp. [[Fox News) buying the Wall Street Journal. Then it was "conservative" Comcast buying NBC, CNBC & MSNBC. Now we have right-wing AOL buying the Huffington Post....

Holy Sh*t.....It looks like "the plan" is working....


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110207/ap_on_hi_te/us_aol_huffington_post

[miss_lish]

What happened to the days when monopolies were illegal? This sounds like progress. Obama?

[Penny]

The same question needs to be asked about the banks as well.

[marxthespot_]

AOL's was the "go to" choice when dial-up was the only way for consumers to connect with the internet. They wanted you to use their browser software that was and is still geared toward placement of their advertisers and their filtered search engine results. They even filter your Google and other search engine results.

When I visited my sister for the holidays last year and used her computer that had AOL software on it, I could not access e-mail from yahoo, and friend could not access their SBC/AT&T e-mail. The web page would show as "not available." However, a laptop accessing the internet through same connection that didn't have the AOL software could go to yahoo and AT&T mail easily. My sister decided to get rid of AOL...

For anyone who has AOL software on your computer, realize that your internet access through their software is filtered and censored based on their whim...

To this day, even though phone and cable companies provide the vast majority of the internet connections, AOL still manages to charge monthly fees to those folks who are not tech savvy enough to realize that they don't need AOL to connect to the internet. I have a very good friend who has been paying AOL $11.95/month for "service" for many years even though he has been getting the internet through AT&T for almost a decade. We called AOL customer service and asked them what the $11.95 per month got them and they said full "tech support" as in if he couldn't access his AOL inbox they could help him and also to provide access to dial-up phone lines. I could not convince my friend, who is in his late 60s, that he didn't need to spend this money at all. He was concerned that "what happens if I can't access my e-mails?" I asked him when did that ever happen and he couldn't remember that it ever did. To this day, he still pays them money...The point is that AOL takes advantage of the public's lack of knowledge and in some cases, plain ignorance, to milk money out of them...

I guess Arianna Huffington wants that $315M badly. I can't blame her for making money on something she created. However, I hope that she is able to take her name off of the "Post" should it start to be editorially controlled by AOL....

[tamla617]

trouble is,in a capitalist system this is what you get.
we [[uk) and the rest of the "free" have the same problem.
but we cant have communism.because someone has to be more equal than the rest [[and i dont mean muslims)
so this is what can happen,i dont know why people are suprised

[olamaebarto]

What happened to the days when monopolies were illegal? This sounds like progress. Obama?

Just look at the break up of AT&T back in the 1980's. Ma Bell is basically back together again.

My phone company in California started out as Pacfic Telephone [[part of AT&T), then Pacific Bell [[after the break up), then SBC and now back to AT&T.

[chidrummer]

From what I'm reading today, Huffington will continue to run the Post with the full support of AOL. I'm going to take a wait-and-see position until more details surface.