As one anonymous dot-com executive remembered AOL’s tactics, “For weeks it was, ‘You’re great, you’re great, you’re great,’ and then one day [we had to] give them every last dollar we had in the bank and 20 percent of our company.” Another dot-commer said AOL demanded 30% of her company, “and then for good measure they tell us, ‘These are our terms. You have 24 hours to respond, and if you don’t, screw you, we’ll go to your competitor.’ ”30 In essence, AOL leveraged its “platform” of eyeballs and dial-up customers in the same way that Microsoft had leveraged its operating system.
