Google works with hotels to hurt travel competition

So yeah, seems like OTAs were okay with this as long as it was IHG, Hilton, Marriott, Accor, Choice Hotels and Best Western doing this on their own (or through fairly low-traffic sites like roomkey.com or pointshound.com), but now that Google actively promotes direct bookings, they’re feeling the effect.

Any move that hurts Booking.com's revenues is a good move, by me.

I don't have an issue with them taking 20% commission, but I loathe all of the dark patterns they employ to make that commission.

   old: OTA makes a $20 commission on a $100 rate through them

   new 1: Google makes an ~$20 commission on a $140 room rate (15%) through Hotel

   new 2: Google makes a $17 commission on the $117 room the OTA now has to sell it. 
   Or the OTA tries to still sell at ~$100 and only makes a $3-$5 commission.

> Google also requires OTAs to give its webcrawlers access to proprietary information including room availability, descriptions, pricing and custom bundles and other data—information that OTAs typically keep closely held from competitors.

Great, the amazon model of "to run on our platform we get all the data of what's profitable for you, how profitable it is, and what buyer interest is, and we then use that to power our competing product which also runs on our platform to take all the profit out of the marketplace and force you out."

Nope this isn't illegal, but again seems like an abuse of position. It's like running a competing restaurant, but also being the city's auditer and gathering all financials as well as the food inspector who is required to inspect (watch) every recipe and dish get made to be able add it to their own menu if it's a hit.

And finally regardless of all of the above, does noone else see it as a problem the general idea of looking for a percentage of revenue of every link a user follows from google? For example next them move into newspapers, and want a percentage of subscription ad-revenue for users forwarded. "Yeah we own adwords, but it's not anti-competitive. You can always run ads on your site and just not be indexed by us. [And not get referral traffic]. If you want us to accurately spider your site and refer to pages, we take a percentage".

So hotels, car rentals, flights, shopping, movie tickets, (and any other search that google productizes)... The end game of this is have any transaction that happens on the web that came from a google referral, they get a cut. It's obviously not there yet, but that's the direction they keep moving: Turn search into an app store / amazon style platform and get 20% of everything on the internet.

Superficially, but more deeply it's part of the propaganda war the WSJs corporate parent has been carrying out against Google on all fronts for quite a long time, which is in part partisan/ideological, and in part business over similar issues in publishing.