AOL Engaged in Dubious Competition Practices for ICQ in Russia

There’s a great commotion today among users of the ICQ instant messaging protocol. While ICQ is certainly far from the market leaders in the US, it is still the most popular IM protocol in Russia and CIS countries with millions of people here using it for personal and business communications - hence everything that concerns this protocol is immediately noticed in the internet community here.

Many people here use ICQ as their only IM protocol without bothering with other things like Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk. But there are also other users, those who use a few IM protocols simultaneously, and more often than not they choose to use some multi-protocol client to use all the IM protocols from one client simultaneously. The most popular clients here are open-source Miranda and the local Qip with many others also enjoying some popularity. And of course AOL is not happy with this situation with its official clients heavily criticized for their features and annoying ads.

Today users of all these alternative IM clients (me included as I’ve been using Miranda for at least 5 years now) have suddenly lost access to ICQ after AOL changed the protocol again (something the company has been doing with ICQ protocol way too frequently lately). But the most suspicious thing is that those users who were on Qip at the time of disconnection also received notifications that ICQ did not support their IM client so they should download a free authorized client from ICQ website. For now it looks like this problem only affects users in Russia while people in other countries are not affected. But given the fact that Russia is probably the most important market for ICQ while people in other countries forgot about ICQ long ago this looks like AOL is trying to fight for the market share of its official ICQ clients in Russia - without causing much noise from the users in the US and other countries.

But the major problem with AOL hoping to get the market share back to its official ICQ clients is that anyone who has ever tried both official ICQ clients and a deeply customizable and extendable with plugin client like Miranda will know that comparing the two is like comparing Internet Explorer to Firefox. Would you ever want to leave your Firefox with all your plugins and extensions and switch back to the rigid Internet Explorer? I guess I know the answer and the answer is very similar for those who has been using unofficial - but much more powerful - clients with ICQ.

Yet as of now this looks very much like the official policy of AOL towards ICQ users here in Russia as a month ago the Moscow PR representative distributed a statement calling users to refrain from using unauhtorized desktop clients for their communications with ICQ and inviting everyone to only stick to official versions. In fact, the alternative clients were even described as dangerous because using them could result in hacking accounts. So today’s change of the protocol that prevents everyone on alternative clients from using ICQ may very well be the next step following the same philosophy.

The obvious reason for such a behavior is hoping to increase AOL’s revenue where it can during these hard times. The simple fact is that when I chat to someone in ICQ using my Miranda client, I do nothing but generate load on ICQ servers without watching their ads. At the same time official ICQ clients available for download on the official ICQ site will serve me ads in addition to letting me chat - hence generating revenue for AOL. And it looks like fighting with alternative clients in this manner sounded more promising to AOL than trying to agree with owners of such clients for some type of revenue sharing.

Of course as a web publisher myself I am all for compensating the ICQ owners for the service they provide me - same as I would be willing to compensate owners of other protocols I use like Yahoo Talk or Google Talk if this is something they want me to do. But unfortunately none of them offers any premium version for me to be able to pay something and still use the protocol in whatever client I want. And offering a bad service only (crappy official clients full of ads) without letting me pay for using something that I am already accustomed to using (ICQ protocol only in a desktop application of my choice)? Strange approach to PR, I think, and I really hope there is some viable solution for the problem that AOL will accept without aggravating Russian users of ICQ further.