That's the message hidden in news that AOL cut 750 jobs this week.

The original assumption of the Time Warner acquisition was that it would control customers through the online service. You can't control customers on the Internet, but you can if they're inside your walled garden.

Time Warner tried a lot of different things in trying to make this happen. It made its content "exclusive" to AOL. It created "AOL for Broadband."

The fact is nothing worked. In fact, Time Warner's content was badly hurt by being exclusive to AOL. Time Warner made its stuff invisible to much of the market.

Now those days are done. As ZDNet noted in its story on this, "The new layoffs come weeks after AOL announced its intention to realign the company and focus more of its resources on the free Web."

The people leaving were devoted to the online service. In its previous set of lay-offs Time Warner dumped the Netscape people who who were working on "the free Web." (Under Mozilla, they're doing fine.)

So what's AOL's real problem?

AOL was, like so many other "Internet companies" of the 1990s, a scam. (Image from Meredith Johnson of the University of Toledo.)

Just as a magazine can have whatever circulation it wants if it's willing to give the product away and not care who buys it, AOL bought millions in circulation with free disks and free time offers.

In the magazine business this can work (for a time) if you're able to sell enough advertising to compensate. But when you buy circulation, you damage your demographics, taking readers your advertisers don't want. Once advertisers they are no longer getting a return, the game is over.

As it is in the magazine business, so it is in online.

The whole "strategy" of Steve Case was a joke.

And the joke was on Time-Warner. Time-Warner bought AOL for half what people thought it was worth at the time, popping the Internet bubble.

But in the end AOL wasn't even worth that, nor even a fraction of that.

AOL was worthless.