Case extolls
the virtures of
public service

The AOL Time Warner chief
urges Punahou students to reach
out to those less fortunate

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By Tim Ruel
Star-Bulletin

It's not enough for students of Punahou School to go to expensive colleges and get good jobs, said AOL Time Warner Inc. chairman Steve Case.

"It's not enough to make money," said Case, a Punahou alumnus who ranked 189 out of the Forbes 400 Wealthiest Americans last year with $1.5 billion.

Punahou should set an example of a school that puts as much emphasis on public service as on good grades, Case said in a speech yesterday to more than 500 Punahou students, alumni and family members at the school's Dillingham Hall.

Case, who graduated from Punahou in 1976, is donating millions of dollars to rebuild its middle school into the Case Middle School, where students will learn in teams instead of classrooms. A Punahou spokes-woman declined to specify the total gift but confirmed it is in the multimillion-dollar range.

Punahou has also received a multimillion-dollar gift from Thurston Twigg-Smith, a Punahou alumnus and former owner of the Honolulu Advertiser. Twigg-Smith's donation will go toward the development of a Center for Public Service at Punahou's Manoa campus.

Case referred several times to the center in his speech, calling on students to care more about problems faced by those less fortunate.

Case also noted he is making a major investment in Hawaii, beyond Punahou.

Two years ago, he spent more than $40 million to buy an ownership stake in Maui Land & Pineapple Co. Last year, he paid $26 million in cash for the debt-laden Grove Farm Co., a major landowner and developer on Kauai.

"Not exactly motivated by the most crisp financial analysis," Case quipped.

He said he hopes his purchases will draw attention to Hawaii, which has been off the radar of other mainland investors. "I think Hawaii deserves that kind of boost."

In a question-and-answer period after the speech, he was asked about reports that Microsoft may exclude AOL's Web browser from its new Windows program. "Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers, unless it's an AOL Time Warner newspaper," Case responded.

AOL, co-founded by Case in 1985, is a $220 billion corporation that owns CNN, HBO and Time Inc.

It is a far cry from when Case started out. At the time, he and his partners merely hoped they would still be alive when the Internet caught on with the public. Those were bleak days, he said, when his family could not understand what he was working on.

"They thought I was going downhill fast," he said.

AOL now provides online services to more than 29 million subscribers. A recent survey shows that AOL's many Web sites are the most heavily used in the world, responsible for more Web-surfing time than Microsoft and Yahoo! combined.

Responding to a question on the need to regulate technology companies, Case contended it is not the big high-tech firms that pose a danger to society. Instead, he said, it is smaller, more desperate start-up companies that are willing to toss aside the privacy rights of consumers in hopes of making a fast buck.

"The real risk is not Big Brother, it's Little Brother," he said.

Case spends much of his time meeting with government officials around the world to craft new policies for emerging technologies, insuring privacy for consumers without putting a stranglehold on business. All the media -- television, the Web, movies, music -- are becoming available through the same channels, Case said.