This might sound a bit hilarious, but the chairman of Microsoft is concerned about the dominance AOL has concerning chat software.
Gates wants the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to investigate the dominance of AOL.
The main reason of his "lobby" is to make America Online open up their chatsystems and get a chance to compete.
The Federal Communications Commission still has to aprove the upcoming fusion between AOL and Time Warner. AOL is currently market-leader with its Instant Messenger and ICQ.
This week Bill Gates tried to pull some strings of some members at the FCC. His message beeing "The FCC has to force AOL to open up ICQ and Instant Messenger". AOL is really doing its best to keep out the competition by not allowing other chatprograms to communicate with their software.
Its ironic that Bill Gates -hater of government interference- is now trying to get help from the government, while this same government is investigating the dominant behaviour of Microsoft.
America Online asked the FCC to hurry up with their descision, so that the merge of AOL and Time Warner can take place.
