[Buckeye McFrog]

Verizon has even given up doing the Email for their Internet service provider customers, moving all Verizon Email into the AOL system, hoping AOL will get the ad revenue Verizon’s own Email web pages were not.

My brother has a buddy who works for Verizon. He's a member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America). They've gone on strike against Verizon twice in the past decade. The last time the issue was that the union was demanding that Verizon make all of their people on the internet/IT side of the house join the union. Rather than do this they just shut down their email service and transferred everybody over to Yahoo and AOL.

My brother's friend thought both strikes were incredibly STOOOOOPID and he lost ground economically on both. This decision was not popular with the rank-and-file.

[Wuli]

From what I understood the union bit was only part of it. AOL and Yahoo came from the Internet content world and Email was their way of driving people to the content, which included ad revenue. Verizon Email began as and operated as a service, which Verizon customers got (”for free”). Verizon Email, from the web service end, was an “IT” service internally at Verizon, which gradully added some content folks to get some ad revenue into it.

So from Verizon’s point of view, they needed Email to move to their best “content providers” and that was their subsideraries AOL/Yahoo, not their internal IT folks.