This morning when I picked up the copy of USA Today outside my hotel room I was surprised to see an article that said that AOL will not charge for broadband users. I thought it was going to tell me of some bait and switch scheme to give me 100 free hours of broadband on AOL that would then convert to some fee (you all know the drill by now). Instead it said that if I have a broadband connection and have had AOL in the last 2 years I can call a toll free number (no on-line option) and have them keep/reinstate my account. I guess if I had ever used my AOL account for anything that I cared about I might think about getting it back but it has been more than 2 years since I got rid of it.

The thing that really caught my eye was the quote:

AOL says it will no longer advertise dial-up service, which costs $9.95 to $25.90, at savings of $1 billion a year.

That seems to me that I will no longer get any AOL CDs in the mail or with a magazine. At least when AOL was mailing out floppies I could format them and use them for something but the CDs just become trash and I have to throw them away. Maybe other companies will take the hint and we will get fewer junk CDs.