It was a walled garden in a slightly different sense. AOL tried their best to force companies to buy AOL “keyword” so that the clueless user doesn’t have to typ

It was a walled garden in a slightly different sense. AOL tried their best to force companies to buy AOL “keyword” so that the clueless user doesn’t have to type .com or .net at the end. If you want a comparison, that is like Google putting “I am feeling lucky” as the only option and then auctioning off that result.