AOL, Inc. may soon be known by another name with a senior executive stating at the weekend that the company may soon ditch its name.

Chief Marketing Officer Allie Kline floated the move with Business Insider, stating that people still relate the name to an email service and don’t realize instead that its primary business is online media as the owner of the unprofitable liberal political site The Huffington Post, tech blog TechCrunch, and the former Weblogs, Inc. sites including Engadget.

The name change is not a forgone conclusion quite yet, with Kline saying that AOL’s biggest priority for the new year is “figuring out its brand and investing in it, even if that means saying goodbye to the name ‘AOL’ in favor of launching something completely new.”

“I actually don’t think there’s a bad choice, but we have to make the choice,” she told the publication. “Are we going to keep the AOL brand or are we going to bring a new brand to market?”

“If you ask me today, I could say, ‘I feel very strongly about the AOL brand. It has a lot of legacy and meaning, and we shouldn’t move away from it!'” Kline added. “But if we met tomorrow, I could be like, ‘Yes! We need a new name!’ It’s a very hard needle to thread for us.”

Different company

If you’re old enough (so basically not a millennial) the name AOL conjures images of dial-up modems, horrible free trial disks, and gross corporate irresponsibility in terms of its now infamous failed merger with Time Warner at the height of the first tech bubble.

While surprisingly the dial-up business still exists today (and is even profitable!) the company has moved on from those days and is now a marginally successful media business with a decent advertising unit attached, including what was formerly Microsoft’s display advertising business.

The name AOL, itself an abbreviation of its former identity of America Online, may hold some sentimental value but it is fair to say that it doesn’t really reflect what the company does in 2016, and under Verizon’s ownership (since May last year) is nothing more than an anachronism that not only can be replaced but arguably should.

What the new name may end up being isn’t clear, but a new name could also reflect a fresh start for the company as it moves forward in the years ahead, clear of its at times dubious past.

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