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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

#281

Post by mschuster91 »

inopinatus wrote: post #234
mschuster91 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 reasona…

> Why should anyone ... be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person 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/w…

> Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop.

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.

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

#282

Post by eli »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #174
eli wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the least, they would find out real fast how big those punitive damages can get when it's a repeated and willful violation. CFAA isn't a joke - there are potential criminal penalties to executives and others within the company.

Could you give examples please. I looked at Wikipedia [0] and did a quick Google but didn't turn up any examples of punishment of C-suite in these circumstances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

I'm pretty sure C-suite executives are not officially exempt from criminal laws that apply to everyone else, but I guess the Supreme Court may yet rule otherwise.

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

#283

Post by Marsymars »

satvikpendem wrote: post #268
Marsymars wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I misspoke, the market value is different, but the actual, objectively measurable value to the company is not.

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.

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

#285

Post by gottorf »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #279
arghwhat wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... Howe…

Just remember to leave early enough to arrive at the airport 90 minutes before your scheduled departure time ;)

And don't forget to factor in that IAH is a 20 mile drive from downtown Houston, and AUS is another 10 miles to downtown Austin! (Combined, that's about 1/5 of the driving distance between the two cities.)

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

#286

Post by StillBored »

1659447091 wrote: post #273
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 Austin is a business flyer route. That's why it's so expensive and you can get a flight every ~30mins or so throughout the day. 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

Austin, isn't representative of anything except a confluence of factors combined with stupidity.

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).

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

#287

Post by listenallyall »

ricardobeat wrote: post #274
listenallyall wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking.com reported net income of 4.2 billion in 2023. More than American Airlines ($822 million), United ($2.6 billion) and almost as much as Delta (4.6 billion). Meanwhile Booking.com has no planes, no hotels, no rental cars, no inventory of anything, really. https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/bkng/financial... https://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2024/American-Airlines... https://www.macrotrends.net/s…

Almost entirely from hotel reservations. The flight business is a small slice of that.

Agreed, but there are more major hotel chains than major airlines, for the purposes of providing a basic comparison. And this particular article was about them and Ryanair.

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

#288

Post by listenallyall »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #255
listenallyall wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You would think the internet would especially be able to split ... 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 o…

The hotel chains can get together and offer a website showing lower prices to their rewards members. 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 p…

The most likely explanation for shutting it down was the enormous cost of driving traffic to the site. After 20+ years of habits, it's hard to tell people about a new site, let alone get them to use it regularly. And given that hotel room prices change all the time, it's difficult to even prove they have the lowest prices.

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

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

#289

Post by felixg3 »

Marsymars wrote: post #221
Wytwwww wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You can still fly businesses and pay the same price as before, it just became massively more accessible than before,

> You can still fly businesses and pay the same price as before 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…

Very interesting. A flight from Europe to Sydney, for example, is 1150€ round trip.

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

#290

Post by satvikpendem »

Marsymars wrote: post #283
satvikpendem wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, I misspoke, the market value is different, but the actual, objectively measurable value to the company is not. 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.

Exploitation has a specific definition in socialist circles, one that many capitalists reject as being misleading at best and malicious at worst. Since we are not in a socialist society, we cannot use their definition of the term, which is what I'm saying you're using. Yes, there can be other types of exploitation in a capitalist society, but the one you're talking about is getting paid "unfair" wages when the only "fair" wage is what one can get via supply and demand. That you or others who live in different cost of living areas might feel slighted does not mean it is exploitation in the capitalist sense; people in a LCoL area may be happy to take a lower wage than a HCoL person, they would not feel exploited due to that.
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