Please do contribute to the conversation any complex hypothesis that you can think of. Don't let the dyed in the wool AOL-Lovers or AOL-Jihadists bother you just because your opinions and evidence may not agree with them.
Maybe if they suck up enough they can get more free hours online? Got to squeeze out enough to make up for that $23 a month charge, so they can keep their multiple screen names from being disabled. Imagine an ISP that charges more than $20 a month for dial-up service? Who would have thunk it? Once again AOL leads the way! Maybe next you can pay $10 extra a month for them not to sell out your information to other companies? Or how about $5 extra a month to block out pop-up ads? The next feature of AOL 8.0 will be dancing screen otters, which will dance as a script kiddie runs a crack script on your client from the AOL Admin account he cracked into. When you see the otter, log off! :)