What's to Be Done with AOL?

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Time Warner CEO Bewkes is likely to prefer a deal for AOL that nets the most cash Noah Berger/Bloomberg news

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Wild cards: Google's stated aversion to involvement in content businesses and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes's likely preference for a deal that gets him the most cash, since even tax savings from a joint venture with Google probably won't get him as far as an outright deal would.

News Corp./Comcast

News Corp. (NWS) could mull a joint venture between MySpace and AOL, as it recently did with Yahoo. Comcast (CMCSA) reportedly held talks with AOL in late 2005. AOL's access business would make sense for Comcast, too. Wild cards: Wallet and will. Plus, it's hard to imagine either would play that hard.

Yahoo

So many execs are splitting that there may not be enough left to make a deal. Yahoo! Japan, though, is a whole 'nother thing. It has Google-esque dominance of a massive market, and its biggest owner is SoftBank Capital, not Yahoo. Partnership and deal talks among the online Big Four in the U.S.—Google, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo—have been constant for years. But the big Web players are thinking multinationally these days—witness AOL's purchase of European social-networking site Bebo—and the yen is now a hell of a lot stronger than the dollar.

If SoftBank and Yahoo Japan dared to chance going global, this would be as good and as cheap a shot as they'll get. Wild card: I was going to say the long flights between multiple company headquarters. But every time I see Sony (SNE) CEO Howard Stringer, he looks remarkably well-rested.

Reinvention

AOL recently opened its popular instant-messaging service to third parties. Why not open its entire platform to developers, the way Facebook and MySpace have? Facebook ignited a universe of fledgling applications businesses with a fraction of AOL's traffic. Letting others do the actual inventing could be the last best chance for Time Warner to create a new and better AOL, and thus drive more traffic and business.

Wild cards: No one would begrudge Time Warner if it lacked the patience for yet another strategy shift for AOL. And doing this would require Bewkes to let AOL depress Time Warner's stock for even longer, which would be a problem. Like AOL itself.

Fine is BusinessWeek's MediaCentric columnist and Fine On Media blogger .