My sister Hannah is the answer to the question, why are AOL's subscriptions falling? A dabbler in the internet, she and her family paid for AOL dialup for years; even though she's now married with a real job, she's kept her AOL address from when she still lived at home with my parents. Last month, she called us to ask about this wonderful world of high-speed internet, and a few days later, Comcast came into her home and switched her over. She cancelled her AOL account.

Many like Hannah have kept their AOL account just for the email address. And though two-thirds of U.S. internet users now have high-speed internet access, AOL's user base is very different; approximately one-third of AOL users are high-speed customers, according to the AP. Yet Time Warner is rumored to be considering a very radical plan: making the coveted aol.com addresses free for users who have switched to other providers' high-speed services.

With Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all offering a wide variety of free email options, and AOL's content now available to all comers, competitive strategy seems to dictate that Time Warner's decision should be already be made. Is board, who might say yes to the plan in their meeting this Thursday, will have to weigh the potential dollar losses (said to be $1 billion between now and 2009) against the untold customer goodwill and increased "eyeballs."

One of my old bosses would say, when he was really mad, that he was HOT! (always said in all caps, you know.) And it appears that AOL's recent move to include advertisements within emails for its paying subscribers is making a few million of them HOT! just like my ex-boss -- even though an AOL survey reported that ads didn't bother its users.

Sure, Google's Gmail has ads alongside its product -- so do the free email offerings of Microsoft, Yahoo!, the list goes on. Everybody's doing ads these days. But internet history says, when you pay for a service, you get it ad-free. It's the inalienable right of the monthly something-and-ninety-five-cents.

Of course, the "throngs" of users (three specific long-time subscribers interviewed for the IDG News Service article said they "planned" to cancel the service, though none actually had) found to be angry by one reporter is hardly a credible threat. And no one who carried the story had any numbers other than the aforementioned "throngs." (How many is in a throng, anyway?) But with Time Warner investors ever-fearful of the dwindling ranks of AOL subscribers, it's enough to send the stock down 1.02%, to $17.43.