Microsoft To Pay AOL $750 Million
from the monopoly-payouts dept
Microsoft has reached a “wide-ranging” settlement with AOL over a number of legal battles they’ve been fighting over. Microsoft will be paying $750 million to AOL (basically, pocket change from the corporate cash stockpile, but badly needed by AOL). As part of the deal AOL will drop their anti-trust claims against Microsoft (filed by Netscape). AOL gets licensing rights to Microsoft’s Media player, and AOL will keep using IE as the basis for their browser (despite owning competitor Netscape – though, this article suggests that this is the sign that Netscape is officially being killed). There’s also some random marketing agreements to jointly work towards digital media adoption (blah, blah, blah) and even a plan to work towards IM interoperability. Also, since there simply aren’t enough AOL CDs clogging up our landfills, Microsoft will now be distributing them as well (at first, I thought this was a joke, but apparently, they’re serious).
