• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 14, 2006

Broadband users have stopped paying for their AOL accounts at a rapid clip, Jonathan Miller, AOL chairman and CEO, told analysts at Merrill Lynch's Media and Entertainment Conference.

Miller declined to provide any numbers, but apparently the rate at which people have halted payment has proven even faster than expected--though why anyone thought AOL users would continue to pay for a service they could now get for free is a mystery. Sure, they could have stopped paying once they obtained broadband, but many of the 6.2 million high-speed users kept the service for the e-mail addresses--often their main link to old contacts.

Merrill Lynch itself had previously forecast that about two-thirds of the 6.2 million broadband users with AOL accounts would stop paying by the end of 2007.

Miller reported that Web users viewed more AOL pages in August than July--thanks to former defectors returning to the service to reactive their now free e-mail accounts. While views were still down year-over-year, Miller said he thought they might grow again by the end of the year.

So, it seems that despite this summer's search data release fiasco--an AOL employee posted search queries made by about 650,000 users, some of which contained names, social security numbers, credit card data and other information that could be used to identify them--people are continuing to use AOL e-mail.

Of course, complaints against AOL are still pending at the Federal Trade Commission, including one filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation last month. Among other items, the EFF asked the FTC to order AOL to pay for credit monitoring services for all members whose data was released.

This week, AOL made a move to satisfy at least that one demand. The company said it would offer most paying members free insurance against identity theft.