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Quote:Time Warner will unveil a new business strategy for AOL on Aug. 2, hoping to put an end to rampant speculation by outlining how the company plans to take its online services into the future, the company said Wednesday.

AOL is expected to announce that it will give away its e-mail and Web services for free in an effort to win back customers who switched to rival services like Yahoo and Google.

The new strategy aims to boost online ad sales, according to published reports, but the company would not comment prior to next week's conference. The addition of more ad-supported services could mean a transformation in which AOL will start to look less like an Internet Service Provider and more like a portal...

Quote:In a move that marks a watershed moment for the Internet, AOL, which made millions of dollars connecting consumers to the information superhighway, will soon be free.

The service, which lured millions of people to the Internet for the first time and was the driver behind history's biggest media merger, will drop access fees for anyone with a high-speed connection beginning in September...

...the change will come at a cost: AOL will probably lose hundreds of millions of dollars of high-profit-margin revenue as dial-up subscribers migrate to broadband. The hope, fueled in part by the success of rivals Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., is that such losses will be offset by an increase in advertising as AOL becomes more popular on broadband....