America Online

Dulles, Va.-based America Online Inc. will take up to $460 million in charges, largely to revamp accounting methods, resulting in losses for its first and second quarters. The company also tapped Robert Pittman, the former chief executive of MTV Networks, to head its core consumer unit and bring a glitzier look to the online service. AOL also unveiled its flat-rate pricing of $19.95 a month for unlimited Internet access and usage. AOL shares rose $1 to $25.625 on the New York Stock Exchange.

AOL said Thursday that it planned to reduce its workforce by a third over the next several months. The New York company, which employs about 6,900 people, is hoping to get as many as 2,500 workers to participate in a "voluntary layoff" program in early December. For the time being, AOL is part of Time Warner, though the media giant is scheduled to spin off the former dial-up Internet powerhouse into a separate company Dec. 9. Chief Executive Tim Armstrong announced the latest round of restructuring Thursday morning.

It's official: America Online Inc. is now simply AOL, after Time Warner Inc.'s Internet unit renamed itself. America Online Inc. acquired Time Warner in 2001, forming AOL Time Warner Inc. But as the Internet access business declined, the parent dropped AOL from its name and again became just Time Warner. In changing its name from America Online to AOL, the unit also converted its legal structure from a corporation to a limited liability company.

Citing irreconcilable differences, Time Warner Inc. said it was legally separating from its much younger spouse, America Online. The marriage, which was announced to great fanfare in January 2000, had been on the rocks practically from Day One -- doomed from the get-go by lofty expectations of a new power couple that could dominate the media landscape for generations to come.

America Online said advertising chief Robert Sherman has resigned after a year with the unit, where ad sales are forecast to fall as much as 45%. The AOL Time Warner Inc. subsidiary said last week that sales of new ads rose in the first quarter and that it expected "double-digit" ad growth in 2004. Sherman, who had come out of retirement to help reverse a sales slide, leaves his job as president of interactive marketing today, a spokesman said.

America Online Inc. has shut down its connections in Russia because of credit card fraud and fraudulent use of passwords, affecting about 2,000 customers. An unidentified number of AOL accounts were opened using fake or stolen credit cards that let thieves use the No. 1 online service without paying, the Vienna, Va.-based company said. AOL charged customers who used the special Russian access phone lines $34 an hour on top of regular monthly charges. AOL said it closed the lines Dec.

America Online Inc. said it is offering refunds on a case-by-case basis to customers who call complaining that they can't log on to the service. The move comes as AOL faces a rash of criticism that the online computer service oversold a product it couldn't reliably deliver. With users swamping the service's lines in response to a new flat-rate pricing plan, busy signals frequently greet subscribers trying to log on during periods of heavy usage. A spokeswoman for Dulles, Va.

AOL Time Warner Inc. said subscribers to its America Online Internet service, the world's biggest, now top 32 million after the company upgraded the software and added a million customers in about 11 weeks. America Online introduced the new version of the service last month that added features for subscribers who access the Web at high speeds. Customers have downloaded the new software 7million times, a "record adoption rate," the company said.

America Online Inc., the No. 1 online service, filed a suit in an effort to stop its customers from being flooded with millions of unsolicited pieces of junk e-mail. The suit, filed in federal court in San Diego against Michael Persaud, alleges that he committed fraud by using various names to send millions of e-mail messages to America Online customers. The suit is one of nine recently filed by Dulles, Va.

Bertelsmann said Wednesday it will form a European joint venture with America Online Inc. and is buying a 5% stake in the fastest growing U.S.-based provider of on-line computer services. The news sparked a furious rally in America Online shares, which jumped $11.25 to close at $82.25, a rise of 16%, on the Nasdaq system.

In 2000, America Online Inc. used its soaring stock price to gobble up Time Warner Inc. and create the world's largest media conglomerate. Nearly a decade later, it's Time Warner that's spitting out AOL. Time Warner said in a regulatory filing Wednesday that it intended to spin off the struggling Internet property, whose advertising revenue plunged 20% in the first quarter. AOL's decline contributed to falling sales and profit at Time Warner.

A high-ranking but relatively unknown Google Inc. executive will take the helm of AOL from television-industry veteran Randy Falco, Time Warner Inc. said Thursday. Tim Armstrong, formerly head of Google's North American and Latin American advertising sales and operations, will take over as chief executive of Time Warner Inc.'s struggling Internet unit. "Tim is the right executive to move AOL into the next phase of its evolution," Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said in a statement.

Harry Potter worked his magic, but continuing struggles at AOL cast a pall over Time Warner Inc.'s third-quarter financial results. The world's largest media company's movie division was one of the bright spots in Wednesday's quarterly report. Revenue there jumped 33%, boosted by the strong box-office performance of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Still, the AOL slowdown remains a big headache for President Jeffrey L. Bewkes, who inherits the chief executive job Jan.

Struggling Internet service AOL said Monday it would pare costs by cutting 2,000 jobs, or one-fifth of its global workforce, as part of its painful transition from a subscriber-based business to an online advertising forum. Job cuts will come in all parts of the company, a unit of Time Warner Inc., but one of the areas expected to be most affected is the Internet-access business that used to be AOL's core.

AOL is once again revamping its Netscape.com Web portal, dropping a year-old "social news" component in which visitors submitted news stories and blog entries and voted on them to determine how they're ranked on the site. AOL, the Internet services unit of Time Warner Inc., said it wasn't giving up on social news completely and would instead send interested visitors to a separate, yet-to-be-determined Web address.

AOL, a Time Warner Inc. unit, agreed to buy closely held Tacoda for technology to place Internet ads based on consumers' online behavior. New York-based Tacoda Inc. plans to track how users view AOL and its partner websites to come up with more targeted ads tied to those preferences. The purchase price is $200 million to $300 million, Dulles, Va.-based AOL said.

America Online has signed a $40-million lease for a Beverly Hills office building that will house studios and offices for its program to develop original content for subscribers to its online services. Dulles, Va.-based AOL will occupy all 82,576 square feet at 331 N. Maple Drive for 10 years under the agreement, said real estate broker Christopher Bonbright of Ramsey-Shilling, who represented landlord Bendheim Enterprises Holdings.

New York's attorney general, adding to America Online's growing pains, said Friday that he will sue the company unless it promises refunds and stops promoting a pricing plan it can't reliably deliver. "You don't sell 10,000 tickets to a theater that you have only 3,000 seats for," Atty. Gen. Dennis Vacco said. "Consumers that want refunds should be able to get refunds."

Averting a looming court battle over how it has handled the exodus from its Internet dial-up service, AOL has agreed to make it easier for its remaining customers to leave as part of a $3-million settlement with 48 states and the District of Columbia.

In the latest sign that Internet companies are stepping up their pursuit of traditional TV advertisers, AOL on Tuesday jumped ahead of network prime-time's annual "upfront" advertising sales season by previewing its own "fall" lineup of programs.