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Dogged by a deadline to open its instant messaging system to rivals, AOL Time Warner is finding the assignment technically tough, an executive says.

AOL reached a deadline Monday to give the Federal Communications Commission a progress report on the project, months after concluding regulatory hearings with the federal commission during its merger hearings. AOL was expected to have an open instant messaging system ready for testing by now.

Barry Schuler, chair and chief executive officer of the Internet arm of AOL Time Warner, says technical hurdles are deterring the company from meeting the federally imposed order. Schuler gave the keynote address at a CTAM broadband conference in San Francisco this week. The event is sponsored by the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing, a trade group for the cable television industry.

"It hasn't being delayed, it's just hard to do," Schuler said after his keynote speech. AOL is "committed to launching a test of the system sometime this summer," he says, but the company has not announced any partnerships with other technology providers.

Innovation Cited

Attempting to convince cable operators and digital television content providers to team with AOL Time Warner on broadband services, Schuler pitched the company's software as the preferred platform for hosting new applications. He called AOL Instant Messenger one of the first and most important applications that AOL can claim as a successful technology.

"People are not on the telephone anymore," he says. "Instant messaging has changed the way people communicate."

But the technology has yet to surpass the telephone, as Schuler predicts it will someday. Like instant messaging applications from rivals Microsoft and Yahoo, AOL's two instant messaging applications--ICQ and AIM--don't let their approximately 30 million subscribers chat with customers of competing systems. Opening up the network was a regulatory stipulation of AOL Time Warner's merger.

"I have consistently said that there are a number of difficulties with interoperability," Schuler says. "One is security. The other is: No one has ever made it work."

He pointed to AOL's rivals, noting, "If it's so easy to do, why hasn't Microsoft done it? Why hasn't Yahoo done it?"

Other Efforts

A number of groups are attempting to come up with a technical solution to the problem. The Internet Engineering Task Force, as well as IMUnified, a group of messaging and technology vendors, are working toward creating a system for interoperability.

Microsoft has recently put more weight behind its instant messaging technology. The company announced it will include its MSN Messenger with the new Windows XP operating system, which is scheduled to ship October 25. The technology combines text messaging with voice and video. Microsoft enhanced the integration of MSN Messenger with its Web-based e-mail service, Hotmail, in a revision released last week.

Yahoo also continues to push its instant messaging technology to consumers.

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