AOL made money by refusing to let people cancel their subscriptions.
AOL took Time/Warner to the bank. They merged, the dot-com bubble burst, and AOL was worth a fraction of what it was at the time of the merger.
AOL would probably already be out of business if they hadn’t of merged. This is the company that bought Netscape, then almost the next day declard IE to be their offical web browser (making their Netscape investment worthless.)