• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 1, 2005

Time Warner dissident shareholder Carl Icahn made headlines Wednesday by warning that he would hold board members personally responsible if the company sold AOL too cheaply.

He indicated in a speech to the New York Society of Security Analysts that Time Warner had rejected potential suitors from bidding for AOL. "Time Warner has not allowed certain people to come to the table," Icahn said, according to a Reuters account.

Icahn didn't specify which companies he was referring to, but it's been widely reported that discussions about AOL between Time Warner and Yahoo! faltered last month. Microsoft remains interested in acquiring a piece of AOL, as are Google and Comcast.

A Time Warner spokeswoman Wednesday declined to specifically respond to Icahn's statement about AOL.

Earlier this week, Icahn--a vocal critic of the Time Warner board--joined with other minority Time Warner shareholders to hire investment bank Lazard Ltd. to evaluate the company's options. Time Warner at that time stated that its board and management "are confident that we are taking the right steps to deliver sustainable value and a highly competitive return to all of our shareholders." Together, the Icahn group holds about 3 percent of Time Warner shares.

AOL's future has been the focus of widespread industry speculation since September, when the New York Post reported that Microsoft was in talks with Time Warner about purchasing a stake in the company.

Several weeks later, reports surfaced that Google and Comcast were also interested in jointly acquiring a minority stake in AOL. Yahoo! was also interested, but it broke off discussions last month.

Google and MSN are both pursuing AOL for its vast trove of content, as opposed to its subscriber base--now 20 million strong, but shrinking fast.

A Google-MSN deal would allow Google, which powers AOL's search engine, to keep the revenue it derives from searches on AOL--about 10 percent of Google's total revenue. A partnership between Google and AOL would also give Google an immediate well of content, including highly coveted broadband video content.

Google has recently been taking steps toward distributing video content--but so far the overtures have been small-scale, compared to Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL. For instance, earlier this year, Google offered video streams of the UPN show "Everybody Hates Chris." This week, Google also tapped entertainment industry veteran Ann Mather to join the company's board of directors.

Microsoft, for its part, would be better able to compete with Google for search traffic by acquiring AOL--and, eventually, powering AOL's search engine.