During an interview at the Web 2.0 conference, AOL CEO Jonathan Miller said that AOL was changing its official name from America Online to "AOL," solving the problem of taking the brand internationally without offending those countries that don't want to have an America Online in their midst.
It's a bit stupid that a country would be offended by the "America" part.
Without that argument, I can still see why AOL would do it though. From a business point of view, it's not that strange to remove "america" from your name if you're going for a global market.
I get it... but the A still fucking stands for "America", even if not officially. If they were going to go all politically correct they should have just changed the name instead. It is a bit retarded that it's called AOL outside of America anyway though. All that said, AOL had the retarded market all sewn up before this anyway.