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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

#41

Post by em500 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #4
snowpid wrote: post #2

Though I am not a legal expert, it is fascinating, that both European companies had this dispute in front of US courts. One hypothesis would be, that Ryan Air lawyers saw higher chances there than in EU courts.

Isn’t Booking an American company now? The company in Amsterdam is a subsidiary of Delaware company with HQ in Connecticut.

Company nationality is a somewhat diffuse concept. IKEA, Chrysler, Fiat and Citroen have holding companies in the Netherlands. Should they be considered Dutch companies? Share owners (also of American listed and incorporated companies) are from all over the world.

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

#42

Post by dhx »

It appears the latest opinion may not yet be published for this case 20-cv-01191-LPS, Ryanair DAC v. Booking Holdings Inc. et al, United States District Court of Delaware.

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.

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

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

#43

Post by mschuster91 »

arghwhat wrote: post #22

> A jury in the District Court of Delaware unanimously found that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse act and that it had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation "with an intent to defraud," the verdict said 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 o…

> and that it had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation "with an intent to defraud," the verdict said

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.

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

#44

Post by bradvl »

The reason that Ryanair is against OTAs reselling flights is not the fees, it’s that they’re often resold as a package holiday.

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.

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

#45

Post by philipwhiuk »

doix wrote: post #7
figmert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be mistaken, but from what I'm understanding is that Booking.com books the flights for you, by automating the booking process on Ryanair (and subsequently add their own fees), whereas the likes of SkyScanner show you the information, then direct you to the Ryanair website to book through the airline.

You're right, I was mixing concepts. SkyScanner and Google flights both do what you say. The companies that SkyScanner and co find are what Ryanair are complaining about. So the likes of; Trip, MyTrip, Kiwi, Expedia, GoToGate etc. I wonder if this will affect all of them.

GoToGate is what booking.com flights actually are (at least last time I booked). So probably.

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

#46

Post by jdietrich »

codedokode wrote: post #40
figmert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be mistaken, but from what I'm understanding is that Booking.com books the flights for you, by automating the booking process on Ryanair (and subsequently add their own fees), whereas the likes of SkyScanner show you the information, then direct you to the Ryanair website to book through the airline.

I wonder how does booking.com pay for the tickets? Do they use a new card for every transaction or do they buy thousands of tickets with the same card? Do they use a corporate card or personal card (which might be against ToS)? If they use a corporate card, isn't it easy for Ryanair to see it and block the transaction? Also, cannot airline see that requests come from datacenter IPs and not from residential? It looks…

Virtual credit cards are an established financial technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_payment_number

IP addresses are a tradeable commodity.

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

#47

Post by michaelt »

Oras wrote: post #30

I always thought booking sites had partnerships with airlines and using an API!

Most airlines have partnerships with booking sites, provide an API, pay the booking site a commission, and have a pricing structure that lets them profitably sell tickets at the advertised prices.

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.

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

#48

Post by 2rsf »

baxtr wrote: post #39
figmert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be mistaken, but from what I'm understanding is that Booking.com books the flights for you, by automating the booking process on Ryanair (and subsequently add their own fees), whereas the likes of SkyScanner show you the information, then direct you to the Ryanair website to book through the airline.

Which is actually convenient for booking users. The Ryanair website is a big mess.

I recently ordered ticket from Ryanair, if you simply look for the "next" button nothing is a mess. The only somewhat messy thing is the content of what you buy, for example a family package has only one large suitcase which is unusual, and that Ryanair are super strict at the airport- I saw someone taking out socks to remove extra 300 grams from their suitcase.

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

#49

Post by wcedmisten »

arghwhat wrote: post #28
always_learning wrote: post #10

pretty bad precedent, id argue that anything thats publicly accesible is free to be scraped. So unless they did something illegal via bypassing security, then this sets a really bad tone for internet archival, web scraping and data collection in the future.

This lawsuit is not about scraping, it is about booking.com acting as a reseller of ryanair products without a reseller agreement - to which they mention that booking.com adds their own profits to the transaction and makes ryanair unable to communicate with the real customer - through "unauthorized access" (scraping). What we on hackernews would consider scraping is not covered by this lawsuit, and ryanair's vendetta…

Would a restaurant have the same case against Doordash? Seems like a fairly common business model

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

#50

Post by lifestyleguru »

rob74 wrote: post #18
lifestyleguru wrote: post #13

Simultaneously being hostile towards users with upselling dark patterns and towards web scappers where everyone is a suspect, that's what most of the web has become.

Mind you, Booking.com is no stranger to using dark patterns itself...

I'm avoiding them at all cost, unfortunately I'm unable to avoid airline reservation websites and apps
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