Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the current chief of Time Warner, once dressed down Mr. Case in a meeting, saying, according to Mr. Klein’s reporting: “The only division that’s not performing is yours. Every one of us is growing, making the numbers. The only problem in this construct is AOL.”

MR. BEWKES I really have a strong point of view that it has never been an issue of culture at Time Warner. I know you’re going to have people, for various reasons that they have individually, say there was the issue of culture at Time Warner. I think that in fact the employees at AOL and Time Warner worked together quite well to try to make the most of the merger, but they didn’t solve the business fundamental challenges at AOL anymore than was solved at Yahoo, MSN, Lycos or I.A.C.

The enduring debate is whether the deal collapsed because the concept was flawed at the start, or because the cultures were too different and the execution of the merger was a failure.

MR. CASE It was a good idea, but the execution of it wasn’t what it needed to be, and I accept responsibility for that. Everybody involved, I think, needs to accept responsibility for that, but that doesn’t take away from the core strategic value of the idea.

MR. LEVIN I used to think at the time it was a clash of cultures and a misreading of the dot-com bubble, but I now upon reflection believe that the transaction was undone by the Internet itself.

I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content? And the consumer has access to everything and now it’s going to be on a handheld device, so what I call the rolling thunder of the Internet started actually to eat its own, which was AOL. AOL was the Google of its time. It was how you got to the Internet, but it was using some old media business ideas that were undone by the Internet itself, and that’s why Google came along.

MR. PARSONS The business model sort of collapsed under us, and then finally this cultural matter. As I said, it was beyond certainly my abilities to figure out how to blend the old media and the new media culture. They were like different species, and in fact, they were species that were inherently at war.