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| Deals | 4 Corporate Players Angle for Stake in internet
After years of playing the part of Wall Street wallflower, America Online suddenly has become the belle of the investors' ball.
Just six months ago AOL was all but left for dead, dogged by an ongoing accounting and advertising scandal that has put the company under the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice. But in recent weeks four corporate powerhouses-Microsoft, Comcast, Google and Yahoo!-have expressed interest in acquiring an ownership stake in the Time Warner-owned Internet company, according to published reports.
Analysts attribute the sudden change of heart to AOL's summertime makeover, which opened up much of AOL's services and content that previously had been available only to AOL subscribers. The shifts transformed AOL from a sleepy also-ran into one of the most popular places to receive broadband content.
Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons, who has long resisted calls by some investors to dump AOL, drove the moves. The executive has maintained Time Warner should hold onto AOL, in large part because the unit is a cash cow with a brand name that if positioned correctly could capture much of the advertising dollars being directed to the Web.
Executives at Microsoft and Google appear to be after the power of AOL's popularity online. Comcast executives have an interest in AOUs ability to help the cable company cope with the socalled "cable bypass" trend, in which some content providers, such as CBSNews.com, are bypassing cable operators entirely by delivering video...