Mr Frankel, a 21 year old programmer was employed by AOL after they had purchased the company Nullsoft that he owned. This was an on-line music company that AOL paid £59.8 million for.

Mr Frankel along with friends stated they came up with the idea of developing a script and posted it to the Nullsoft web-site that allowed users to get rid of ads.

A web-site called zeropaid.com that provides a directory of free software is promoting the use of this program indicated that this would not go down well with AOL.

It was stated that the timing was an embarrassment for AOL as they were currently going through a merger with Time Warner Inc. who had made complaints to AOL about this script who then removed it from the nullsoft.com web-site.