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Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

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Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#261

Post by throwaway2037 »

sureIy wrote: post #201
FinnKuhn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Ryanair wants to upsell you during the buying process, which they can't do as well, if you don't buy on their site.

This is the reason. 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
Does anyone else have the experience where 25-50% of the click-here-to-buy from Google Flights just don't work? Is it bait-and-switch from the carrier?

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#262

Post by vidarh »

shiroiushi wrote: post #245
xienze wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We used to regulate air travel. It was a lot more expensive then. 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…

Air travel in coach is still not too bad as long as you take an international flight. The US domestic flights, however, are truly awful.

I stopped over in Newark once on the way to SFO from Europe. Never again. The domestic flight from Newark to SFO was such a nightmare I'd much rather do the full 11 hours direct on a Transatlantic flight.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#263

Post by s1artibartfast »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #236
renewiltord wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's normal. Information is a very valuable resource. It's often the case that advertising companies can be very profitable while people advertising using them have worse margins.

The information being referred to here is not scarce, though. 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.

> The information being referred to here is not scarce, though. >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.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#264

Post by Havoc »

chrisjj wrote: post #218
Havoc wrote: post #92

How does the fraud part come in here? Not seeing it

When buying the ticket, Booking.com pretends to Ryanair to be the customer.

I see. You’d need to be pretty daft to think the booking website is Ryanair but yeah I guess

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#265

Post by AlchemistCamp »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #134
arghwhat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you still regulate it, just differently. 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 rea…

Flying budget air carriers is already so incredibly cheap in the EU. It is cheaper to fly from Belfast to London, than it is to fly Houston to Austin (half the distance) or Houston to New Orleans (roughly the same distance). I wish the US could figure that out.

Houston to Austin only takes a couple of hours to drive. Flying would be slower, more hassle, way more polluting and more cramped.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#266

Post by arghwhat »

skissane wrote: post #242
arghwhat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's what you want, not what booking.com wants. Booking.com wants to charge you for the service, and if they're not part of the transaction they'd have to get money out-of-band, e.g. as a subscription for the price finding service. Remember that this lawsuit is between two large companies both trying to get your money.

> Booking.com wants to charge you for the service, and if they're not part of the transaction they'd have to get money out-of-band 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…

The ruling does not say anything about screen scraping or automation, and the verdict also holds if warm bodies in low cost countries were used.

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"

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#267

Post by pixelatedindex »

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #227
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite examples of any industry or niche , anywhere in the world, that was newly regulated, and once regulation tool place, prices materially dropped? Geniuinely curious.

When California re-regulated the wholesale energy markets after the Enron debacle. Source: https://www.apep.uci.edu/PDF_Research_Summaries/Impact_Of_El...

And now CA has gone full circle with how PG&E rules the roost over here. Outside of a few places, it’s very much a monopoly.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#268

Post by satvikpendem »

Marsymars wrote: post #226
IncreasePosts wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offering locally competitive wages is exploiting? 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?

Well... yes? If digital widget producers are worth $x to the company, and get paid 0.8 x in one location and 0.4 x 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…

> CoL isn't really related to the market value of labour for remote-capable jobs

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.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#269

Post by chrisjj »

Havoc wrote: post #264
chrisjj wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When buying the ticket, Booking.com pretends to Ryanair to be the customer.

I see. You’d need to be pretty daft to think the booking website is Ryanair but yeah I guess

That is not the deception. You see a Booking.com page offering a Ryanair ticket. The one deceived is Ryanair, when it gets an order from Booking.com pretending to be you.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#270

Post by arghwhat »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #265
jermaustin1 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying budget air carriers is already so incredibly cheap in the EU. It is cheaper to fly from Belfast to London, than it is to fly Houston to Austin (half the distance) or Houston to New Orleans (roughly the same distance). I wish the US could figure that out.

Houston to Austin only takes a couple of hours to drive. Flying would be slower, more hassle, way more polluting and more cramped.

Heh, reminds me of the saying: An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time.

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.)

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