• Washington Post, Monday, December 12, 2005 10 AM

Over the weekend, America Online founder Steve Case made his case for splitting up the slow and lumbering Time Warner, Inc. in an editorial published in the Washington Post. Case noted that while the Time Warner-AOL merger was designed to speed up the transition of AOL's dial-up business to broadband, thereby bringing Time Warner's content to the Web, largely the opposite occurred, as both AOL and Time Warner started slowing each other down. As pure-play companies like Yahoo! and Google have zoomed past Time Warner and AOL, Case, like the investor Carl Icahn, feels the company should be split into four smaller, more aerodynamic companies to help it compete. These would be Time Inc. (publishing), Time Warner Cable (communications), Time Warner Entertainment (TV and movie production) and AOL (Internet media and services). Case points to the resurgence of former Time Warner holding Warner Music since its spin-off, saying the result for AOL could be a renaissance on a par with Apple, Inc., whose stock is up an astounding 134 percent this year. Interestingly, Case claims to have had no discussions with Carl Icahn or his advisors about his feelings, despite proposing a nearly identical plan.   

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