What do you do when your company once ruled the Internet, but years of incompetence and an inability to adapt to a changing market results in tens of millions of customers defecting? If you're AOL, you apparently raise prices. AOL is informing dial-up customers that as of July 27, they'll be raising the price of dial-up service from $9.99 to $11.99 per month. "This plan is still a great value," an e-mail to customers claims, "saving you at least $3 to $10 per month over comparable plans from other major Internet service providers."

While AOL still makes $2 billion a year from its dial-up business, they've made it clear they want to be an advertising and portal juggernaut instead of a connectivity provider. A price hike simply expedites the already bloody subscriber mass exodus. You can apparently stay at the $10 rate if you don't call for software support. CNET seems to believe the price hike is a work of genius, disguised as the work of an idiot:Having not seen AOL make a solid business decision for a better part of the last decade, it seems more likely that Time Warner is simply trying to speed up AOL's "evolution" from carrier to ad engine in preparation for a sale.