Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by com » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

ytwySXpMbS wrote: post #67

com wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for rail, I quite like trainline.com. It tries to hide the madness that is very poor national/private rail service and their ticketing regimes, but really there’s only so much you can do, so often I get two or more tickets for legs of travel, some of which change as I remain on the same train?!?

I use Railboard, exactly like trainline but without the booking fee as it's made by national rail

Thanks for that! Unfortunately UK only? Do you know of similar no-fee apps for pan-European travel?

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

#82

Post by amelius » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

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…

> (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.)

How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?

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

#83

Post by ericd » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

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…

Why is the CFAA mentioned, then? That’s historically been used as a bludgeon against scraping.

“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.”

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

#84

Post by gumby » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:44 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #82

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…

> (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.) How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?

> Booking.com's … 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.

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

#85

Post by slightwinder » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:47 PM UTC

doix wrote: post #3

Pretty light article, does anyone have any more context? Does this set a strong precedent for all these types of sites? Booking.com wouldn't be the only site reselling airline tickets, in fact I wasn't even aware they did flights. 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 perpetrat…

> Does this set a strong precedent for all these types of sites?

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.

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

#86

Post by naiv » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:48 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #84

amelius wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.) How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?

> Booking.com's … 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.

They own Priceline, Kayak, Agoda and a lot of other sites

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

#87

Post by blackeyeblitzar » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:49 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #84

amelius wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.) How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?

> Booking.com's … 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.

They’re bigger in Europe

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

#88

Post by slightwinder » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

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.

It's not public, it's just generally accessible but with rules. It's similar to how a physical shop is accessible to everyone by default, but the owner still has the right to refuse business and deny access if you behave bad. The problem is that you can't easily deny companies like booking-com access to a website, as they can circumvent any technical barrier.

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

#89

Post by amelius » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #84

amelius wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.) How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?

> Booking.com's … 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.

> According to Booking Holdings (Booking.com)'s latest financial reports the company's current revenue (TTM ) is $22.00 B. In 2023 the company made a revenue of $21.36 B an increase over the years 2022 revenue that were of $17.09 B

(from a google search)

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

#90

Post by bboygravity » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #87

gumby wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Booking.com's … 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.

They’re bigger in Europe

And (South East) Asia