AOL has agreed to pay $3 million and change its customer services practices as part of a settlement with 48 states and the District of Columbia over customer complaints over the process of trying to cancel an online account.

AOL didn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing in the settlement. California was among the states that played a leading role in the settlement. New York and Florida were the only states that didn’t participate in the inquiry.

Commentary: AOL has invested heavily in its ethics efforts, both internally and externally, in recent years and it is nice to see them start to get some of these legacy issues from a past and different leadership regime behind them. As far as we can tell, it’s a different company culture now.

As AOL’s company spokeswoman Amy Call pointed out in discussing the impact of the settlement: AOL had already voluntarily improved the way it handled cancellations during 2005 and 2006. In her words “This just codifies those safeguards.”