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List:       jabber-jadmin
Subject:    Re: [jadmin] AIM transports
From:       "Nathan J. Mehl" <memory () blank ! org>
Date:       2001-03-26 17:47:05
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In the immortal words of John Hebert (john@vedalabs.com):
> 
> I've heard the argument that AOL should be allowed to do whatever they 
> want with their servers in order to protect their market share. 

You're about to hear it again:

They own the servers and the network.  They pay a non-trivial amount
of cash money to keep it operational.  They are not anywhere close to
monopoly control of instant messaging in general.  Ergo, they can do
whatever the hell they like with it.

I appreciate the convenience of being able to access AIM from my
jabber server, but I am under no delusions that they are under any
obligation, moral, legal, ethical or otherwise, to allow me to do so.

And by the way, the blocking most likely has nothing to do with their
market share -- by definition, anybody accessing AIM from any client
increases their "share" of the IM "market".  The more likely scenario
is that it's about protecting their _revenue stream_ -- ie the money
they get from those annoying little ads in the "official" AIM client.
Until aim-t comes up with a way to display those, we can expect this
behavior to continue.

-n

------------------------------------------------------------<memory@blank.org>
five claws each rear paw
seven claws on the front paws
a cat named Haiku                                              (--Mark Amidon)
<http://blank.org/memory/>----------------------------------------------------


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