The AOL merger made no sense at all. AOL was dial-up. Time Warner already had its own cable that provided high speed internet. If buying AOL brought their customers over to their cable system then it might have made sense. I don’t think that was the purpose of the merger. It’s never been clear to me what the purpose was.
It was to try to digitize, or merge the print and movie media with the internet. Levin was dumb enough to think AOL and the internet were synonymous, when the internet had actually already left AOL behind.