I imagine this is limited to a scenario where you: 1. Act as a middle-man for the transaction (as this lawsuit was about resale), 2. Interfere with pricing or other service aspects, 3. Add your own profit. I don't think this sets any precedent against scraping on its own.
(The highly variable and discriminatory pricing of travel would also best be addressed in regulation, rather than relying entirely on third-party resellers to rescue you.)
The implied conclusion that regulation makes things expensive is wrong, and comparing the air travel market over half a century ago with the market today, and crediting a change made in 1978 for the difference doesn’t make sense.
EU air travel is quite regulated with e.g. consumer rights for cash compensation, hotel and food service in case of delay, and yet air travel reached a point some years before covid where some providers played with the thought of having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway, so more travelers meant more revenue even if their tickets were zero.
Disallowing discriminatory and unfair business practices is not the same as having the government set travel prices.
I'm not sure this is the gotcha you think it is. Air travel, even in coach, was downright luxury compared to where it is today, and I'm not even talking about in the distant past, I'm talking about 25 or so years ago. Seats are narrower, legroom is practically nonexistent, and the seats only recline like two inches these days. Also almost everything is a la carte.
Apparently this part of the biz is taking a bit of a nosedive, and he expects airline prices to skyrocket to compensate for the loss in revenue.
Where was the "defraud" happening here? When Ryanair wants to make money on flights they shouldn't offer flight tickets that only make money when they can lure the consumer to purchase addons via a boatload of dark patterns.
For me as someone looking to book a flight, bookingcom acts as a user agent in my service so why should Ryanair have any legal basis on preventing bookingcom from doing so?!
Side note: Where is a service where I can just enter from/to which city/airport I want to fly (or in Europe also rail), what luggage and passengers I carry, and it spits me out the cheapest price offered for the route and sells me the ticket(s) without having to create individual accounts, spread payment info around and try to fight myself through a shitton of dark patterns, broken English and constantly changing UIs? I know this shit is possible, travel agents live and breathe for that stuff, but I'd like to do that myself instead of getting upselled by the travel agent. Rail and flight should be dumb pipes.
This lawsuit is not about ryanair's pricing model, so that the company engages in bad practices is irrelevant to the court decision. What matters is that booking.com wants to earn money on selling ryanair tickets while evading using reseller agreements by using the site as if they were a private customer (likely also against the terms of service), with supposedly some bad side-effects like ryanair being unable to communicate with the customer (which could be bad if they wanted to e.g. give you a notice about the flight during the sales process).
You will have to sue ryanair specifically about their pricing to get a decision on that, which of course first requires ensuring that it is unlawful or unfair business conduct within your jurisdiction (which it might not be).
> bookingcom acts as a user agent in my service so why should Ryanair have any legal basis on preventing bookingcom from doing so?!
They are not your useragent, they are acting as a reseller: You buy a product from them which they acquire elsewhere, taking a profit in the process.
If they were in fact entirely transparent in the process, merely allowing you to purchase the product at the best available price directly (e.g., a plugin to find deals/discounts, VPN to get it from the cheapest region, etc.), then the case would have been hard or impossible for ryanair to make.
Try momondo.com. You can add # of luggage (checked in & cabin) and play with some other parameters. They won't, or very rarely will, show train connections. They sometimes show bus connections, though.
For train travel I find trainline.com quite good. It gives you an overview over what's available an with which carriers. They are UK focused but offer tickets throughout Europe.
The Man in Seat 61 is (https://www.seat61.com/) is an invaluable resource to inform yourself about train travel. Mostly focused on Europe but covering the world.
Hope this helps.
Edited to add : I use Momondo as an information resource about available carriers and pricing for specific routes. I would never book via an OTA, but strcitly with the airline executing the flight. No matter if it's a few franks more.
If there's any problem with your flight you're up shit creek if you have to deal via a third party.
I had to load the desktop version of vueling.com the other day just to have the UI understand that I didn't want to purchase a return flight.
How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?
Do they have a significant grip on the market? I’ve never used them, but for all I know they sell a majority of plane tickets.
Then again I haven’t used Ryanair either. The reputations of Ryanair, Spirit etc are sufficient for me to avoid them. But in booking.com’s case I barely even know it exists.
[1] https://calawyers.org/privacy-law/ninth-circuit-holds-data-s...
> Part E: Computer Fraud an Abuse Act Loss
> Did Ryanair prove by a preponderance of evidence that it suffered actual economic harm caused by Booking.com violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and, if yes, state the amount.
> X Yes _ No
> $ 5000
> Part E Nominal Damages
> $ 0
> Part F: Punitive Damages
> $0
I know Rynair won the lawsuit but uh, having to pay only 5k sounds like a win for Booking.com
I would imagine that it is also a nice foundation for cases against AI training data scraped from sites.
1. Jury verdict is "NO" to CFAA violations.
2. Jury verdict is "YES" to CFAA violations and the jury award $0.
Is option (2) worse for Ryanair because it more negatively impacts any appeals process that they may have otherwise planned?
Does the award of $0 become a precedent which is stronger than option (1) in deterring would-be CFAA litigants of the future?
So, damages of 5k is strictly the lowest amount possible while also answering YES for CFAA.
> too big to effectively cut off
This is also true for the hotel industry, and is part of their moat. Smaller hotels especially can have the bulk of their revenue coming from aggregators, so they can’t drop the platform regardless of how much they like it or not. Building your own marketing channels is hard and expensive.
Package holidays are flights bundled with hotels etc and are usually sold at much higher margin.
Ryanair has its own package holiday business and prefers that they make the margin, not someone else.
There are many more package holiday companies than airlines, they want to use this ruling and the fact that they also own an airline to restrict competition and make more money.
I'm sure that a lot of dislike from low cost airlines comes from shitty OTAs rather than the airlines themselves.
I recently tried to use Expedia to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto on Porter Airlines because then I could use my TD Reward points.
The default prices that showed up in the results looked the same on Expedia or directly on Porter, so it didn't seem like I was losing anything.
Except that base flight included no carry-on and no checked-baggage, which I needed to do. On Porter directly fixing that cost an extra $40. Expedia said it cost $60.
For this particular flight I also needed to be able to make changes after booking. On Porter that increased the cost by $100. On Expedia, $150.
I still did it, cuz, y'know - points. But I shook my fist at Expedia the entire time.
This is the first opinion on the case from 2021 which denied Booking Holdings Inc request to dismiss:
[1] https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/sites/ded/files/opinions/20-cv-...
Ryanair (Irish company) makes one claim against Delaware corporation Booking Holdings Inc (including subsidiaries Kayak Software Corporation and Priceline LLC as Delaware corporations and Agoda as a Singaporean company) citing 18 USC 1030(a)(2)(C), (a)(4) and (a)(5)(A)-(C)[2]. Amongst reasons to seek dismissal of the case, Booking Holdings Inc name drops Etraveli, Mystifly and Travelfusion as the three companies which were used by Booking Holdings Inc to scrape airline websites including Ryanair's website.
It's hard from just this opinion to figure out what exactly Booking Holdings Inc, Etraveli, Mystifly and/or Travelfusion may have been found to do wrong. It sounds most likely that Ryanair may have successfully argued their public website is a "protected computer" because there is a "By clicking search you agree to the Website Terms of Use" button on their main website search form, and the ToS is the form of "protection". Looking behind the scenes, it's a fairly simple "anonymous token" API request without any secrets being required to ask the API to respond.
Deleting the HTML elements from the DOM that provide the "By clicking search you agree.." and the associated checkbox doesn't prevent the form from being submitted and results returned successfully.
Here in Illinois, at least, they make it up to a felony to violate a web site ToS, and it's specifically worded as such in the statute.
Does Booking.com do something particularly bad compared to something like SkyScanner or Google flights?
> "We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.
Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly? Sometimes it's a few bucks and I book with the airline directly, but sometimes it's over $50 cheaper to book through some 3rd party I've never heard of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPCO
However, interpreting this data properly is decidedly nontrivial (>1M LoC).
Pricing does not imply booking is OK, though. And even circa 1999, Southwest hassled us (ITA Software) about even showing their fares, without us offering any way to book any flights on any carrier.
Booking.com brands themself as European, during the DMA debattes and complained they have a disadvantage to American competitors.
> "We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.
I thought piracy was distributing unauthorized copies of things like music and videos. Wouldn't booking.com's actions be closer to unauthorized ticket brokering?
I guess if you want to demonize someone for doing something you don't like it sounds worse to be labeled a "pirate" than an "unauthorized broker."
Issue was that Kiwi pocketed refounds, would not inform customers of flight changes, changing baggage was very hard...
Ryanair service is OK (if you take it as a bus company). There do no play dead as Airbnb support. During covid they provided refunds sooner than Lufthanza for example.
Of course, now with AI that's a different story, but barring AI scraping a page for data should not be illegal just because the company wants to sell you API access.
It seems the bigger issue at hand may be booking.com purchasing the tickets and adding a lot of hidden fees on top.
What gets me is why on Earth any provider would allow this - dealing direct is so much more sane 99% of the time, and a package holiday provider already has a reseller agreement.
Just stomp booking.com into the ground - I simply don’t understand why hotels and airlines don’t do it?
Classic prisoners dillema. The problem is all the hotels, etc. need to be on the same page.
It’s everything that was before Google captured all the advertising revenue there ever was. And reduced it to a list on a black ink on white page
Airlines are in a race to the bottom because there are only 8 bits in the 1970s booking system so there is only a competition on seat price. Chnage that to be able to have different parameters and we compete on other factors
If hotels are just competing for price on booking.com then they are heading to the same trap - beautiful architecture, fantastic location, smiling staff, 1950s movie stars making films in the courtyard- none of it matters if it’s price per room in NYC.
The only way cows stop being treated like cattle is to make sure every human sees them as individuals - it’s a lot of work. But the struggle is worth the abbatoir.
My assumption is that the issue was not about automation/scraping, but rather, the way in which booking.com engaged in scraping amounted to some kind of fraud.
That is of course until you add all the additional charges.
If you bypass that process they don't make their profit.
AFAIK, it's impossible to resell flight tickets in EU, they are attached to real names that are checked upon boarding time. If wonder how did Booking manage to resell Ryanair tickets at scale?
[the airline, Europe's largest by passenger numbers, has in recent years launched a series of legal actions against third-party booking platforms that resell its tickets without permission.
It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.]
(It's _possible_ that this is a recent DMA/DSA compliance thing, I suppose.)
If you search on google you are also agreeing to their terms, there just isn’t a checkbox.
Ryanair doesn't pay a commission to booking sites, and their pricing model is to advertise $15 flights but making booking an obstacle course so plenty of passengers find themselves paying $60 instead.
They therefore don't provide an API for the booking sites to use.
The short answer is... uh, not much. The order on the motion to dismiss suggests that to violate the CFAA, there is a requirement that you're specifically bypassing some form of access control, and it says the complaint sufficiently alleges such control (specifically password-protects internet accounts). Which... is a somewhat weak argument, but the judge here seems to think that HiQ is narrowly focused on "what's publicly available without requiring users to authenticate themselves." The motion for summary judgement states:
> Booking and Kayak admit that their access was intentional, and there are no factual disputes that Booking’s and Kayak’s access circumvents authentication mechanisms implemented by Ryanair specifically to keep Defendants out.
which, again, is vague on what those authentication mechanisms were, and it's not like this article provides any elucidation.
It's far from certain that this will be overturned on appeal, but "creating an account to use for screen scraping" doesn't sound like something that CFAA prohibits.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...
This is the goal of almost every business and that isn't against the free market it is the free market and the precise reason we have regulators to ensure competition.
Business would much rather be proprietary and not have to work that hard.
I never thought I’d find myself arguing Ryanair’s corner, but adding booking.com to the mix likely just makes an already poor experience with Ryanair truly dire.
Also, cannot airline see that requests come from datacenter IPs and not from residential?
It looks like it is super easy to block this on airline side.
Ryanair has successfully sued other companies doing the same for a while now. But I mostly know about their cases in the EU. This case is from USA.
> Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly?
It's not necessarily cheaper, the flight-search is usually just better in filtering, and has a cache of previous results. So humans might get the same cheap result if they just search long enough and know how to use the airline-site efficiently.
> sometimes it's over $50 cheaper
$ tells me you are in the US where these kind of legacy shenanigans happen. Never with Ryanair.
Out of curiosity, I did go and check a bunch of routes that I know Ryanair flies on SkyScanner, and it was cheaper to buy directly from Ryanair. So fair play to them, I'm surprised anyone would buy from a 3rd party when buying direct is cheaper.
Presumably, given they're fine with Google Flights:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67873695
"In a statement, Ryanair described the online agents as "pirates". It said it would "continue to make its fares available to honest/transparent online travel agents such as Google Flights," which it said "do not add hidden mark ups to Ryanair prices and who direct passengers to make their bookings directly on the Ryanair.com website"."
Disingenuous at best. Google Flights is not a Ryanair agent.
What we on hackernews would consider scraping is not covered by this lawsuit, and ryanair's vendetta is not against scraping but "pirate online travel agencies" (resellers).
“A US court ruled that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing part of Ryanair's website without permission, court documents showed, a ruling the airline said would help end unauthorised screen scraping by booking sites.”
But I guess my scraping is a lot less, as I'm only looking for a few flights
That freight also helps explain why nearly empty flights can make sense economically.
When the food delivery apps "scrape", it's sometimes okay, but often not: The food offered by a place might be made to be eaten immediately, in which case a 60 minute delivery might guarantee a horrible experience. The food might not even be safe to transport by intermediate handlers, such as if the food is not packaged in sealed containers. In both cases, the food place ends up with dissatisfied customers and bad reputation for something they neither did nor wanted to do.
John Oliver had an interesting video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII
Meanwhile booking.com has a recurring pattern of diverting you via search results to show you extra sponsored results. My experience is that Ryanair is far easier to navigate and book than Booking.com
I have learned that the hard way. My flight was cancelled and I don't get any notification. There is a real communication issue between OTAs and airlines. After a week of poking the customer service, I got a refund from Opodo, fortunately.
>GoToGate was used for a time as the flight provider for Booking.com for various European countries.[7]
The part that annoys me is the losses are redacted [1]. Judging by the length of the redaction its much more than the $5000 they were ultimately awarded. I'm also very unclear what harm will actually befall Ryanair if the losses weren't redacted.
[1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18414221/354/ryanair-da...
Website owners will also never stop scraping and prosecuting the owner of every crawler (who can obfuscate their identity anyways) is impossible.
Captchas are going to increasingly become more obsolete.
It's a fools errand to spend resources fighting scrapers.
Edit (non cancerous URL) https://i.redd.it/o6xypg00uac91.png
non-cancerous url
CFAA isn't a joke - there are potential criminal penalties to executives and others within the company.
Likely outcome: they negotiate a deal with RyanAir for access to their data & API.
Lets say the cost is £35, and thus ryanair makes £5 profit per passenger.
Now lets say someone else comes along as sells the ryanair flight for £30 and has their own "upselling": "Click here to not avoid missing out on our great protection package" etc. Ryanair now is making a £5 loss on each ticket sold, and the reseller is making it instead.
Depends where you are, really. In Europe, where Ryanair does virtually all their business, courts have generally been reluctant to take the "haha, you clicked on the website, you've magically agreed to the license" thing as being particularly meaningful, and recent regulations have cut down the usefulness of EULAs even further.
That said, Ryanair prices aren't login-walled anyway.
> It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.
When I buy something from the supermarket, they add charges and make it difficult for the manufacturer to contact me directly, so that isn't illegal. Many things with bad outcomes are legal.
Breaking the terms of service of the site may be illegal, and if you're mis representing yourself to log in, even more so.
But then you're also moving away from what I would term screen scraping.
Probably a good thing in the case of most manufacturers.
Pros of Expedia:
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- they have my card
- their website does not suck as much as the airline’s
- they let me cancel within 24/48 hours for free and immediately
> Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time
You can't really though - e.g. 25 years ago you could fly economy from Vancouver Canada to Sydney Australia for $2600. (Inflation adjusted.) You can now do that flight for $1400. Pretty good, but the kicker is that flying business class is now $5300. Even premium economy is $4400. (Prices are all the cheapest I see on Google Flights over the rest of 2024, so some of them are limited to very specific dates.)
Probably the most equivalent price to 25 years ago is basic economy plus paying for a meal, snack, checked bag and selection of an exit row seat, but today's premium economy is probably the most equivalent service level to yesterday's basic economy.
Remember that this lawsuit is between two large companies both trying to get your money.
I think you misunderstand what I meant. To be more specific: if the ruling says that automated booking via screen scraping is illegal – what's to stop Booking.com hiring warm bodies in low cost countries, replacing their fully automated solution with a semi-automated solution to dodge the ruling, and continuing to charge their customers for that service?
What was ruled was that:
1. That Booking.com "intentionally directed, encouraged or induced Etraveli to access the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization"
2. That "Etraveli recklessly caused Damage to a protected computer by way of such access to the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization"
3. That "Etraveli caused both Damage to a protected computer and Loss by way of such access to the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization"
4. That booking.com "knowingly and with intent to defraud, directed, encouraged, or induced a third party to access the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization and by means of such conduct furthered the intended fraud and obtained something of value for booking.com"
5. That "the object of the fraud and the thing of value obtained by Booking.com [was] only the use of the myRyanair portion of Ryanir's website"
Nothing is stopping airlines from offering 1-click bookings, except that lengthy funnels bring in tons of cash. Ryanair has been a master at this since the beginning of time.
In 2020 I booked a flight directly on Google Flights and the booking was complete before I even realized, it was so simple. I never found that UI again.
> I booked a flight directly on Google Flights
From what I can find e.g. SF to Sydney was $2300 US in 1986 (over $6000 now).
London - Sydney. Allegedly might have been as low $600 (~$2200) both ways in 1980 (though I don't think economy back then was even remotely close to modern business class...)
It wasn't a pejorative comment. Africa and SE Asia have huge labor forces that perform this work.
People really need to stop trying so hard to be offended.
It’s only because of Ryan Airs business model of upselling via dark patterns that they care.
And because of these dark patterns, parent as a consumer is willing to pay someone else to go through the booking process and avoid the dark pattern on their behalf.
And the point is good: if company A is annoying to interact with, why can’t you pay company B to do it for you?
I think one interesting question from this is what happens when you put an AI in there instead. If Company B sells an AI that Person can use to interact with Company A, at what point does it count as Person's interaction and at what point does it count as Company A's interaction.
Obviously Person is allowed to use technology to interact on behalf of them. They are using Chrome, or IE, or Firefox, etc. This doesn't count as Google/Microsoft/Mozilla interacting with Company A. So on a continuum (likely multi dimensional) from internet browsers to what Booking.com did in this case, including AI somewhere in the continuum space, where is the legal limit?
Yeah so what? Why should anyone, be it a private person or a commercial entity, be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person or entity?
The only thing I'm willing to accept as a restriction for any kind of legal transaction is a reasonable price cap (i.e. no sale above face value of tickets + 5% fees) to get scalpers under control and for security reasons (e.g. name-bound tickets for sports events to prevent hooligans from attending or flight tickets to prevent terrorists from boarding).
But neither applies in this case - flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers and the airline has the full set of PNR data.
because:
> flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity
Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop. They form a contract for a service between the airline and the customer. They're not a bag of fucking apples. Travel agents, when arranging air fares, are agents in the legal sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency) and not resellers. Booking.com were screwed on that front because they were deceptive in the particulars, a failure of good faith dealing that undermines the claim of agency.
Why are they not? It's not like there are any airlines beyond oil sheikh owned ones that actually deliver customer service. The only reasonable choice a customer may have is to choose between operators that fly Boeing deathtraps or not.
The commodity is getting transported from A to B, getting treated like shit including getting groped by TSA or its equivalent, and not getting replacement for a bag that's marked as "lost" when it's actually clearly trackable with an AirTag to some bowels of any in-between airport.
If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop. Airplane tickets are scarce in that there is limited ability to adjust supply, especially in the short term. If flights to a destination are booked, you can't just throw another plane on the route because the gates are limited and inflexible.
I don't think so, because a predatory scalping market only happens when artists are pricing their tickets below the market rate.
Airlines have so such compunction, so they'd just raise their prices until scalpers no longer had a margin opportunity. Or, to put in another way, airline pricing is already as "predatory" as the most aggressive scalping markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_payment_number
IP addresses are a tradeable commodity.
Easily solveable by getting a data SIM, plugging it into a LTE/5G USB stick, and routing your traffic through that.
The average wage in Nigeria is about $25 per day [1]. The fundamental difference between Wyoming and West Africa is cost of living.
[1] https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/average-salary-in-nigeria/
Extractive industry is such a job creator there that for decades now, e.g. McDonalds couldn't keep enough people on hand. Why would I work a shitty job for minimum wage, when I could work another, similarly shitty job, for 4 times that amount?
Extractive industry is such a job creator in Wyoming that they actively resist e.g. renewable energy projects that would provide economic stability during inevitable bust years, because it challenges the concept of extractive industry, even as extractive industry generates the boom/bust cycle.
Southern Wyoming doesn't even have fucking Uber, you really think they're starving for gig-sector jobs like this?
Much ballyhooing about “neo-colonialism” followed.
(from a google search)
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/bkng/financial...
https://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2024/American-Airlines...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UAL/united-airline....
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/delta-air-lines-full-2023-103...
They are doing significantly better than the main competing travel agent website:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BKNG/booking-holdi...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EXPE/expedia/marke...
What I always find interesting is middlemen businesses that don’t do any of the risky and laborious work, such as operating hotels and airlines and car rental businesses, earning higher profit margins and profits than the businesses that have to put much more on the line.
You would think the internet would especially be able to split the profit margin of these middlemen between the customer and the actual businesses that do the work by automating and commodifying the middleman’s function.
[0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/05/13/bookingcom-gatekeep...
"<$1 per video transcribed" may be an order of magnitude more expensive.
I wish the US could figure that out.
Lot of it comes down to individual airports and fees. Part of the reason that RyanAir flies into Buvais rather than CDG or Orly when you fly with them to 'Paris', or that other joke airport they use instead of Berlin.
You can also fly Austin<>LA/Denver for 1/3-1/2 the cost Houston<>Austin. I've flown to Canada (from Tx) for less than a Houston/Austin (or Austin/Houston<>Dallas) flight.
These routes are where high-speed trains would excel...if one could get past the airline lobby
First, its a ~30 min flight to Houston, and a ~40 min flight to Dallas, two of the largest and busiest hub airports in the USA. So, a massive amount of american/united Austin traffic is Austin->IAH/DFW->destination if your not flying southwest with a direct route. Yes, there are a number of direct routes to other places, particularly large hubs (DEN/ATL/JFK/etc) but its like once a day or every other day for non hub airports.
But that pattern is doubly reinforced through local decisions which have resulted in ABIA being the number #1 airport in the USA for flights per gate.
AKA, by gate count it has the highest utilization of any airport in the USA, and this is the result of the anti-growth politics for the past 40+ years, that did things like move the airport from Mueller, to ABIA while initially planning on having the same number of gates as Mueller, and only relenting and adding 4 (IIRC) more. And keep in mind that Mueller was frequently like going to a crowded standing room only bar. And not only was ABIA undersized but it wasn't designed for serious expansion. And really, there wasn't any excuse when one looks at any airport designed in the past half century its obvious where the terminal expansion is planned (ex:DFW) with the better designed airports like TPA/MCO using a hub and spoke model. Instead what Austin is going to get is an ad-hoc expansions which will result in Heathrow levels of suck (and its already that way for the south terminal, where one has to leave the airport, drive for 10 mins and then re-enter).
Houston to Austin seems to take 50 minutes by flight vs. 2 hours and 30 minutes by car. That's not the best convenience ratio for a domestic flight (going between the two largest cities in Denmark is 40 minutes by air vs. over 3 hours by car), and it's certainly more expensive...
However, whether it's more polluting actually depends on a lot of things. Comparing a fully booked, modern commercial passenger plane vs. a car carrying a single person usually has the airplane coming out on top (heh). A modern car with all seats occupied beats the airplane though.
(A naturally aspirated V8 without direct fuel injection leads to a divide by zero in any efficiency calculations.)
I'm sure that was pretty far-fetched and not something actually viable. Considering duty-free isn't even a thing for most Ryanair/other cheap airline flights because they are inside the EU.
Because when the EU regulates things like this, the result is usually pretty good. But when the US regulates things, it turns into regulatory capture and only helps the big corporations at the expense of everyone else.
It's a bit like unions: Americans complain about how bad labor unions are, because in the US they didn't work out very well at all. But Europeans like unions, because over there they seem to work pretty well. So obviously, the US just can't do unions properly, just like they can't do a lot of regulation properly (see: FAA/Boeing).
The US doesn't do things like well because Americans don't trust their institutions and think governments are inherently corrupt and ineffective, so they think might as well join in (and then perpetuate that corruption/ineffectiveness).
Sounds like the way countries typically considered "corrupt" probably work. But for some reason, Americans don't like to think of their country as being as corrupt as someplace like [random central American country], despite evidence to the contrary.
Geniuinely curious.
Splitting MA Bell into the Baby Bells also helped for a while. Then, they started merging back together. Then, the oligopolies made service worse again.
If left on their own, they collude to do a minimum form of competition while cooperating on profitable ways to cheat customers. That’s called cartels. It’s as big a threat to the free market as governments.
Source: https://www.apep.uci.edu/PDF_Research_Summaries/Impact_Of_El...
If a company is based in NYC, and has a branch in rural Ohio, are the Ohioans being exploited if they aren't paid as much as their NYC counterparts despite drastically reduced cost of living in rural Ohio?
If digital widget producers are worth $x to the company, and get paid 0.8x in one location and 0.4x in another location, I'm not sure why I'd regard that as anything other than exploitative.
CoL isn't really related to the market value of labour for remote-capable jobs; it would be similarly exploitative if the company paid childfree people, vegetarians, and basement apartment dwellers less because of their drastically reduced cost of living.
I could see a point for fairness if the salaries were scaled so that average post-CoL savings in different CoL areas were equal, particular within regions (e.g. a country) where people have freedom of movement.
I mean, it is. Wages are a market, thus supply and demand applies. We are not in a socialist society where there is some inherent "exploitation" which is basically what you're talking about.
I would assume you also believe that every single person working for a wage is also by definition exploiting regardless of where they are? Otherwise it would make very little sense...
I don’t know about the quality of those services. It might be that the company operates in a cruel trashy way. But if we call it a hypothetical, and stipulate that the company unilaterally extends worker protections approximately equal to American worker protections (and much more attractive than local protections), would that change the calculus?
It’s the same difficult work wherever it’s done. But in one context, it pays a really attractive wage and reflects good working conditions compared to the other options available to the worker. In the home context, the same wages would not provide a remotely adequate standard of living, and the worker has better options and should probably take them.
In that framework, isn’t it more humane to take the work where it does the most good for the people doing the job? For that matter, doesn’t it help raise the standards in the remote job market: when a company comes around that’s rich enough to offer workers the choice of a job with better protections, doesn’t that encourage local businesses to make their protections more attractive too?
“The average wage in Nigeria is about $25 per day.” Wages in Southern Wyoming are more expensive than that. Gig or minimum is irrelevant.
> how does that relate to minimum wages
Wyoming is subject to the federal minimum wage.
> how does that relate to minimum wages with respect to gig work?
We’re comparing two numbers and observing one of them is bigger.
A recent example that isn’t regulation so much as revealing was Google Fiber vs established telecoms. The established companies had low speeds on purpose in many areas. They couldn’t do better. After Google Fiber hit, we’d sometimes see a comparable offering show up in just that area very quickly. As in, they could’ve done it the whole time but refused to soak up more profit.
That’s the kind of abuse that regulation is supposed to deal with. Whereas, the breakup was using regulation to force the companies to operate like a free market. That’s often necessary because the companies will make more profit if they collude to cheat customers. Or workers as we saw in the wage scheme in Silicon Valley.
That we're not in a socialist society is exactly the reason for any inherent exploitation.
And like, I'm saying this as a pretty gung-ho capitalist.
good to know
If it isn't obvious yet, the enormous reach and scale of the internet does the exact opposite, it basically guarantees consolidation. Booking and Expedia each used to be 4 or 5 independent companies. The booking engines wield power by de-listing any operators who offer lower prices anywhere else, and none of the hotel chains can risk not appearing on the sites, even more so when there are only two.
In fact they did, called roomkey.com Hilton/ihg/marriott/hyatt/choice/wyndham options could all be searched simultaneously, and you get the lowest price and the hotels avoid paying commission to Expedia and booking.
But they shut it down. I wonder if it was because hotels are usually franchised, and the brands get a percentage of revenue as royalty, so they don’t care about commissions the hotel operators have to pay. So they decide to price discriminate via the travel agents.
It should be similarly trivial for the airlines and car rental companies to get together and offer the same website. Isn’t it better to give customers a 7% discount rather than give booking/Expedia 15%?
Obviously, reality is different so there must be a reason. I’m guessing the gains from price discrimination are more than the losses from commissions.
Plus it is hard to get competitors to work together on something. Orbitz was started by a partnership of airlines. It IPO'd and then was acquired by a private company, all within 3 years after launching. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz
All airlines and hotels and car rental websites show everyone the information, at the cost of a few minutes low effort button clicking. A vast change from how difficult and time consuming it was to access information before the internet.
I think the difference in information is tremendous. getting 100 quotes from hotels from individual hotels websites would take many hours, and is a 5 second operation through booking.
Consider that you might do that several of times in the process of creating a booking, it might represent a dozens of hours of information collection and organization.
organization and accessibility has tremendous value to the customer.