> 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 or other service aspects, 3. Add your own profit. I don't think this sets any precedent against scraping on its own.
(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.)
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 reached a point some years before covid where some providers played with the thought of having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway, so more travelers meant more revenue even if their tickets were zero.
Disallowing discriminatory and unfair business practices is not the same as having the government set travel prices.
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).
RyanAir used to fly to Morocco, and it was often cheaper to go Dublin -> Marrakesh than it was to get a plane or train from London to Manchester.
Lot of it comes down to individual airports and fees. Part of the reason that RyanAir flies into Buvais rather than CDG or Orly when you fly with them to 'Paris', or that other joke airport they use instead of Berlin.
A pilot friend who flew for ryanair showed me around control tower of Frankfurt Hahn (hint: nowhere near the real frankfurt) some ten years ago. We were shooting the shit with the controllers as a private jet plane came in on the radio, asking permission to land. After some back and forth they discovered this was the fake frankfurt, and eventually didn't come in for landing. That got a good chuckle from everyone...
Ryanair flies to Berlin. Even before the new airport, they were flying to Schoenefeld which was just outside the city limits. In fact, the old airport was just across the runaways of the new one and you can still reach the old terminal building with the commuter train. Schoenefeld was the old East Berlin airport, which was indeed suboptimal for the load of travellers it got over time.
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).
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.)
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.)
I wish this wasn't the case. Lack of tax on jet fuel and massive taxpayer funded subsidies for airlines is why a flight is £20 and rail is like £100. It's just ridiculous. But people like their cheap flights so they won't vote to not destroy the planet.
> having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway
I'm sure that was pretty far-fetched and not something actually viable. Considering duty-free isn't even a thing for most Ryanair/other cheap airline flights because they are inside the EU.
Maybe the answer is for the US government to not regulate these things, but instead somehow allow the EU to regulate them on US soil. (No, I have no idea how that would work legally.)
Because when the EU regulates things like this, the result is usually pretty good. But when the US regulates things, it turns into regulatory capture and only helps the big corporations at the expense of everyone else.
It's a bit like unions: Americans complain about how bad labor unions are, because in the US they didn't work out very well at all. But Europeans like unions, because over there they seem to work pretty well. So obviously, the US just can't do unions properly, just like they can't do a lot of regulation properly (see: FAA/Boeing).
The US doesn't do things like well because Americans don't trust their institutions and think governments are inherently corrupt and ineffective, so they think might as well join in (and then perpetuate that corruption/ineffectiveness).
> think governments are inherently corrupt and ineffective, so they think might as well join in (and then perpetuate that corruption/ineffectiveness).
Sounds like the way countries typically considered "corrupt" probably work. But for some reason, Americans don't like to think of their country as being as corrupt as someplace like [random central American country], despite evidence to the contrary.
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?
Everything about regulating Big Telecom. They didn’t want to run lines to people, drop long distance, increase broadband speed, etc. Each time, the behavior was countered by regulation or the threat of it.
Splitting MA Bell into the Baby Bells also helped for a while. Then, they started merging back together. Then, the oligopolies made service worse again.
If left on their own, they collude to do a minimum form of competition while cooperating on profitable ways to cheat customers. That’s called cartels. It’s as big a threat to the free market as governments.
They broke a private company into many competing companies. Then, at various times, they forced the companies to serve customers in ways they were simply unwilling to. They’d tell lies why it couldn’t be done. After regulation or threat of it, they rapidly accomplished what they previously couldn’t.
A recent example that isn’t regulation so much as revealing was Google Fiber vs established telecoms. The established companies had low speeds on purpose in many areas. They couldn’t do better. After Google Fiber hit, we’d sometimes see a comparable offering show up in just that area very quickly. As in, they could’ve done it the whole time but refused to soak up more profit.
That’s the kind of abuse that regulation is supposed to deal with. Whereas, the breakup was using regulation to force the companies to operate like a free market. That’s often necessary because the companies will make more profit if they collude to cheat customers. Or workers as we saw in the wage scheme in Silicon Valley.
Card payments are regulated in the EU, and prices are much cheaper. Contrast that with New Zealand where there is often a 2.5% surcharge on credit card and contactless payments.
On net close to 0. Roughly 50% the cargo holds of passenger aircraft are now taken up by air freight which adds quite a bit of drag and isn’t part of those comparisons and offsets the reduction in passenger legroom.
That freight also helps explain why nearly empty flights can make sense economically.
> 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 is a la carte.
> 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, so some of them are limited to very specific dates.)
Probably the most equivalent price to 25 years ago is basic economy plus paying for a meal, snack, checked bag and selection of an exit row seat, but today's premium economy is probably the most equivalent service level to yesterday's basic economy.
I can see round trips from e.g. London for ~1000€ but to be fair business class seems to start at ~4000.
From what I can find e.g. SF to Sydney was $2300 US in 1986 (over $6000 now).
London - Sydney. Allegedly might have been as low $600 (~$2200) both ways in 1980 (though I don't think economy back then was even remotely close to modern business class...)
You already have the choice to pay more to upgrade to better seats/experience. If I value price over luxury, why would you want take that choice from me? There is no world where we regulate first class for everyone but at basic economy prices.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
This lawsuit is not about ryanair's pricing model, so that the company engages in bad practices is irrelevant to the court decision. What matters is that booking.com wants to earn money on selling ryanair tickets while evading using reseller agreements by using the site as if they were a private customer (likely also against the terms of service), with supposedly some bad side-effects like ryanair being unable to communicate with the customer (which could be bad if they wanted to e.g. give you a notice about the flight during the sales process).
You will have to sue ryanair specifically about their pricing to get a decision on that, which of course first requires ensuring that it is unlawful or unfair business conduct within your jurisdiction (which it might not be).
> bookingcom acts as a user agent in my service so why should Ryanair have any legal basis on preventing bookingcom from doing so?!
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.
If they were in fact entirely transparent in the process, merely allowing you to purchase the product at the best available price directly (e.g., a plugin to find deals/discounts, VPN to get it from the cheapest region, etc.), then the case would have been hard or impossible for ryanair to make.
It’s only because of Ryan Airs business model of upselling via dark patterns that they care.
And because of these dark patterns, parent as a consumer is willing to pay someone else to go through the booking process and avoid the dark pattern on their behalf.
And the point is good: if company A is annoying to interact with, why can’t you pay company B to do it for you?
Isn't the issue that you can do that, but Company A can also add in a clause that you can only do business with us (or with this specific product/website/etc. we offer) if you agree to be buying the tickets for yourself and not for someone else. In which case, if Company B says they are, they are lying.
I think one interesting question from this is what happens when you put an AI in there instead. If Company B sells an AI that Person can use to interact with Company A, at what point does it count as Person's interaction and at what point does it count as Company A's interaction.
Obviously Person is allowed to use technology to interact on behalf of them. They are using Chrome, or IE, or Firefox, etc. This doesn't count as Google/Microsoft/Mozilla interacting with Company A. So on a continuum (likely multi dimensional) from internet browsers to what Booking.com did in this case, including AI somewhere in the continuum space, where is the legal limit?
> 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 reasonable price cap (i.e. no sale above face value of tickets + 5% fees) to get scalpers under control and for security reasons (e.g. name-bound tickets for sports events to prevent hooligans from attending or flight tickets to prevent terrorists from boarding).
But neither applies in this case - flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers and the airline has the full set of PNR data.
> 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/wiki/Law_of_agency) and not resellers. Booking.com were screwed on that front because they were deceptive in the particulars, a failure of good faith dealing that undermines the claim of agency.
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.
Setting aside the parts of this question that sound like bitter personal experiences, the simple answer is that commodities are traded on commodity markets. If one doesn’t exist, it’s because no-one has figured out how. In this case it’ll be because bookings aren’t fungible and the services not identical.
flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers
If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop. Airplane tickets are scarce in that there is limited ability to adjust supply, especially in the short term. If flights to a destination are booked, you can't just throw another plane on the route because the gates are limited and inflexible.
> If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop.
I don't think so, because a predatory scalping market only happens when artists are pricing their tickets below the market rate.
Airlines have so such compunction, so they'd just raise their prices until scalpers no longer had a margin opportunity. Or, to put in another way, airline pricing is already as "predatory" as the most aggressive scalping markets.
> Where is a service where I can just enter from/to which city/airport I want to fly (or in Europe also rail)
Try momondo.com. You can add # of luggage (checked in & cabin) and play with some other parameters. They won't, or very rarely will, show train connections. They sometimes show bus connections, though.
For train travel I find trainline.com quite good. It gives you an overview over what's available an with which carriers. They are UK focused but offer tickets throughout Europe.
The Man in Seat 61 is (https://www.seat61.com/) is an invaluable resource to inform yourself about train travel. Mostly focused on Europe but covering the world.
Hope this helps.
Edited to add : I use Momondo as an information resource about available carriers and pricing for specific routes. I would never book via an OTA, but strcitly with the airline executing the flight. No matter if it's a few franks more.
If there's any problem with your flight you're up shit creek if you have to deal via a third party.
>If there's any problem with your flight you're up shit creek if you have to deal via a third party.
I have learned that the hard way. My flight was cancelled and I don't get any notification.
There is a real communication issue between OTAs and airlines.
After a week of poking the customer service, I got a refund from Opodo, fortunately.
On the flip side if something goes wrong you get to discover what $RANDOM_VENDOR in $RANDOM_COUNTRY thinks is a reasonable policy for handling it, which is not usually a big risk for domestic USA travel, but for international travel can be a true wrench in the spokes.
Maybe but if $RANDOM_VENDOR isn't willing/able to help, I don't really expect Expedia to. That said, I do use an agent to arrange self-guided walking trips and things like that and they seem to be a useful resource rather than planning and booking the whole thing myself, in part, because a lot of local knowledge can be involved. But that's different from booking 5 nights in some European city.
I had a couple of times when car rentals and hotels decided to add surprise charges when I arrived. As those was booked through Expedia, the latter refunded me those immediately (and I suspect went and got them back from the vendor later)
There is no general legal right for one entity to interpose itself between another entity and its customers. The concept of a User Agent is not a legal concept, it is merely a technical term. If RyanAir doesn't want you to interact with its site through Firefox, they have a legal right to do so. They doubly so have the right to ban Booking.com from buying tickets on your behalf, and then selling them to you for more money.
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?!?
Just a quick follow up, I haven’t been able to find Railboard pricing in the UK that is more than 1p cheaper than Trainline, so I’ll probably stick with the latter, which also offers pan-European ticketing, which is fairly important to me.
> (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?
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
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.
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.
What I always find interesting is middlemen businesses that don’t do any of the risky and laborious work, such as operating hotels and airlines and car rental businesses, earning higher profit margins and profits than the businesses that have to put much more on the line.
You would think the internet would especially be able to split the profit margin of these middlemen between the customer and the actual businesses that do the work by automating and commodifying the middleman’s function.
> 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 on the sites, even more so when there are only two.
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 percentage of revenue as royalty, so they don’t care about commissions the hotel operators have to pay. So they decide to price discriminate via the travel agents.
It should be similarly trivial for the airlines and car rental companies to get together and offer the same website. Isn’t it better to give customers a 7% discount rather than give booking/Expedia 15%?
Obviously, reality is different so there must be a reason. I’m guessing the gains from price discrimination are more than the losses from commissions.
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
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.
That's probably true. I've never used them in the US but they seem to often be the site of choice in Europe and Asia (and, based on one recent experience in Europe, can have inventory that can't be accessed any other way). That said, you also have to take direct bookings into account which is most of what I (at any rate) do.
Destroying their business model is impossible, because both customers and hotels want it. Destroying their grip on the market (I assume you mean accommodation and not flights) would be by offering a better service.
This will very likely be overturned as it flies in the face of the 9th circuit court decision on HiQ vs LinkedIn. This is in a different circuit, so it'll need to be elevated, but CFAA is absolutely the incorrect tool to be utilized here.
I haven't followed the facts of this case, and I haven't found any quickly online. The best I have is the order on the motion to dismiss [1], which covers why the judge thought HiQ v LinkedIn wasn't sufficient prior precedent to preclude this being a CFAA violation, along with Ryanair's motion for summary judgement [2] which suggests the results of discovery.
The short answer is... uh, not much. The order on the motion to dismiss suggests that to violate the CFAA, there is a requirement that you're specifically bypassing some form of access control, and it says the complaint sufficiently alleges such control (specifically password-protects internet accounts). Which... is a somewhat weak argument, but the judge here seems to think that HiQ is narrowly focused on "what's publicly available without requiring users to authenticate themselves." The motion for summary judgement states:
> Booking and Kayak admit that their access was intentional, and there are no factual disputes that Booking’s and Kayak’s access circumvents authentication mechanisms implemented by Ryanair specifically to keep Defendants out.
which, again, is vague on what those authentication mechanisms were, and it's not like this article provides any elucidation.
It's far from certain that this will be overturned on appeal, but "creating an account to use for screen scraping" doesn't sound like something that CFAA prohibits.
The CFAA has not been amended, but there was DoJ policy change on enforcement. So everyone is always breaking the law in the course of normal business, and it's still up to the prosector to determine who to go after:
- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-...
> Did Ryanair prove by a preponderance of evidence that it suffered actual economic harm caused by Booking.com
violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and, if yes, state the amount.
> X Yes _ No
> $ 5000
> Part E Nominal Damages
> $ 0
> Part F: Punitive Damages
> $0
I know Rynair won the lawsuit but uh, having to pay only 5k sounds like a win for Booking.com
Minimum wage is not applicable for gig work. It would basically be the same business model as companies like https://rev.com, which can be <$1 per video transcribed.
But we're comparing minimum wages in two places when the minimum wage is not a relevant number, since, as stated above, minimum wage does not apply to gig work.
Do you not know anything about the economy of southern Wyoming?
Extractive industry is such a job creator there that for decades now, e.g. McDonalds couldn't keep enough people on hand. Why would I work a shitty job for minimum wage, when I could work another, similarly shitty job, for 4 times that amount?
Extractive industry is such a job creator in Wyoming that they actively resist e.g. renewable energy projects that would provide economic stability during inevitable bust years, because it challenges the concept of extractive industry, even as extractive industry generates the boom/bust cycle.
Southern Wyoming doesn't even have fucking Uber, you really think they're starving for gig-sector jobs like this?
Because racism!!! Not really, there have been quite a few stories recently about companies claiming to be AI powered when in fact they are using African workers to perform tasks. The Turk bit is just what Amazon called their platform for outsourcing crappy repetitive work, which is named after the famous mechanical Turk.
the original chess playing Mechanical_turk was a fraudulent device, likely more at home proximal to the nigerian princes, than with wild west gypsy wagon snake oil peddlars
For context, OpenAI recently caught flak from the less substantial organs of the American press for outsourcing RLHF/safety/content moderation tasks to a small SF firm called Sama (surely coincidental, eh @sama?). Sama hired workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India and paid them well above prevailing local wages, but the work involved the usual unpleasantness that content moderators have to deal with.
Much ballyhooing about “neo-colonialism” followed.
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?
If digital widget producers are worth $x to the company, and get paid 0.8x in one location and 0.4x 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 their drastically reduced cost of living.
I could see a point for fairness if the salaries were scaled so that average post-CoL savings in different CoL areas were equal, particular within regions (e.g. a country) where people have freedom of movement.
> 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.
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.
Isn't this the classic problem with getting involved in poorer economies? The African workers are worse off than if they were treated as an average US worker, but better off than an average African worker, and definitely better off than if Sama has hired Americans instead.
offering jobs well above prevailing local wages = exploiting
I would assume you also believe that every single person working for a wage is also by definition exploiting regardless of where they are? Otherwise it would make very little sense...
Offering jobs in areas with laxer worker protections is arguably exploitative because in most or all of america this sort of work comes with counseling, due to the horrific nature of some of the content to be moderated. I don't know offhand of OpenAI ensured this was available; if not, that's a substantial financial savings at a cost of human suffering, which fits some folks' definition of exploitation.
If I remember correctly the labor protections sounded commensurate, at least in form, with American standards: counseling (for whatever it’s worth), attempting to restrict hiring to people over age 18 (although the journalists did interview a person who fraudulently used a relative’s ID to get hired at age 15), etc.
I don’t know about the quality of those services. It might be that the company operates in a cruel trashy way. But if we call it a hypothetical, and stipulate that the company unilaterally extends worker protections approximately equal to American worker protections (and much more attractive than local protections), would that change the calculus?
It’s the same difficult work wherever it’s done. But in one context, it pays a really attractive wage and reflects good working conditions compared to the other options available to the worker. In the home context, the same wages would not provide a remotely adequate standard of living, and the worker has better options and should probably take them.
In that framework, isn’t it more humane to take the work where it does the most good for the people doing the job? For that matter, doesn’t it help raise the standards in the remote job market: when a company comes around that’s rich enough to offer workers the choice of a job with better protections, doesn’t that encourage local businesses to make their protections more attractive too?
Which part? Mechanical turk is an Amazon service for crowdsourcing work, and Africa has cheap IT literate labor so would be a good source for this type of work.
You cannot have option 2; jury instructions required that CFAA requires >= $5k of damages. ("If your answer to that question is no, do not answer the remaining questions in Section 1").
So, damages of 5k is strictly the lowest amount possible while also answering YES for CFAA.
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.
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.
I was at a startup event last year where someone that had been very senior and instrumental in Ryanair starting was talking to a small audience (<40 people). He told the story of how they didn't notice booking.com was "stealing" so much of their profit. To rephrase his words: "We gave those guys free advertising on our site and without us realising they were quickly making more profit per head than we were. Before we noticed and could do anything they had gotten too big to effectively cut off." So it's funny to see this posted and that the frenemy fight continues to this day.
skyscanner would list ryanair traffic on their sites. even though they don't make money from ryanair via click referrals but because of the traffic that ryanair brings.
The “free advertising” has little impact on profits from flight tickets, as most aggregators don’t sell at a huge markup. He’s probably thinking of revenue Booking made from hotel bookings, where margins are way higher - but that’s not really taking away revenue from the flight company (and they get affiliate agreements to earn back a significant chunk of that).
> too big to effectively cut off
This is also true for the hotel industry, and is part of their moat. Smaller hotels especially can have the bulk of their revenue coming from aggregators, so they can’t drop the platform regardless of how much they like it or not. Building your own marketing channels is hard and expensive.
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.
A big part is fees. OTAs like Booking sell the base part of flight from Ryanair and low cost airlines at the same price as the airlines but with much higher fees for luggage and extras. They hide this second part from flight search engines, so they appear cheaper when including luggage.
I'm sure that a lot of dislike from low cost airlines comes from shitty OTAs rather than the airlines themselves.
I recently tried to use Expedia to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto on Porter Airlines because then I could use my TD Reward points.
The default prices that showed up in the results looked the same on Expedia or directly on Porter, so it didn't seem like I was losing anything.
Except that base flight included no carry-on and no checked-baggage, which I needed to do. On Porter directly fixing that cost an extra $40. Expedia said it cost $60.
For this particular flight I also needed to be able to make changes after booking. On Porter that increased the cost by $100. On Expedia, $150.
I still did it, cuz, y'know - points. But I shook my fist at Expedia the entire time.
- they have my card
- their website does not suck as much as the airline’s
- they let me cancel within 24/48 hours for free and immediately
The second point can be a huge selling point and it applies to a lot of OTAs. Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time and sometimes I get fleeced anyway (oh, here’s a $5 convenience fee for using a credit card we don’t like)
> Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time
I have a similar experience. As a result, I have not booked a flight directly on the carrier's website in years. Do only suckers use the carrier's website now, because the prices and/or service are always worse? Sigh.
I still try to book direct because I (uh) enjoy opening 10 sites/apps at once and comparing the prices and getting the last dollar, but yeah if you value time more than money, booking direct is not a great idea.
Not that this would help now, but you might have been able to book through Expedia and then later add the luggage through the airline directly. Still can't use points on it but maybe you could have saved the points for another vacation some other time.
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.
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?
The underlying systems are old, slow and have multiple layers of caching, plus it’s a huge search space, so you’re never really seeing real-time availability. It’s just the nature of it that a lot of the times the tickets are already gone, though Google used to be one of the most reliable.
>Ryanair is against free market. They want to have monopoly, to raise prices.
This is the goal of almost every business and that isn't against the free market it is the free market and the precise reason we have regulators to ensure competition.
This is like standard business methodology these days. Nearly every company prefers this. Just ask any olympian how hard it is to even get to the olympics let alone win.
Business would much rather be proprietary and not have to work that hard.
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:
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.
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 perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.
Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly? Sometimes it's a few bucks and I book with the airline directly, but sometimes it's over $50 cheaper to book through some 3rd party I've never heard of.
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.
Yup, and having needed customer service the one time I booked a flight through booking.com, I can confirm that they absolutely get in the way - a name change on a ticket turned into an almighty rigamarole with charges left right and centre - even though it was booking who had truncated the name - and the airline wouldn’t talk to me directly as I wasn’t the booking party, booking.com was. The airline said the change would have been free if they could do it themselves, but the request had to originate from booking.com, who not only charged nearly €200 but also took so long about it (a week) they were almost too late.
I never thought I’d find myself arguing Ryanair’s corner, but adding booking.com to the mix likely just makes an already poor experience with Ryanair truly dire.
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.
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 like it is super easy to block this on airline side.
Is it? it’s certainly no worse than EasyJet, and unlike the larger transatlantic carriers (ba/united/delta are the ones I’m most experienced with) the websites are navigable, performant, and actually functional.
Meanwhile booking.com has a recurring pattern of diverting you via search results to show you extra sponsored results. My experience is that Ryanair is far easier to navigate and book than Booking.com
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.
> 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.
I'm actually from the UK, just wrote it in dollars since it's a currency I assume everyone knows the value of. I just check SkyScanner and buy from the cheapest reseller. Very recently I had to buy a ticket from Edinburgh to Oslo, it was £45 cheaper to buy it from Trip.com than directly from Norwegian Airlines.
Out of curiosity, I did go and check a bunch of routes that I know Ryanair flies on SkyScanner, and it was cheaper to buy directly from Ryanair. So fair play to them, I'm surprised anyone would buy from a 3rd party when buying direct is cheaper.
"In a statement, Ryanair described the online agents as "pirates". It said it would "continue to make its fares available to honest/transparent online travel agents such as Google Flights," which it said "do not add hidden mark ups to Ryanair prices and who direct passengers to make their bookings directly on the Ryanair.com website"."
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 is not against scraping but "pirate online travel agencies" (resellers).
Depends. Established, well-behaved food delivery apps have agreements with the restaurants and have direct integration - not scraping. They take absurd margins, but that's a separate issue.
When the food delivery apps "scrape", it's sometimes okay, but often not: The food offered by a place might be made to be eaten immediately, in which case a 60 minute delivery might guarantee a horrible experience. The food might not even be safe to transport by intermediate handlers, such as if the food is not packaged in sealed containers. In both cases, the food place ends up with dissatisfied customers and bad reputation for something they neither did nor wanted to do.
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.”
Ryanair had previously send Cease & Desist letters to Booking.com so they were very explicitly unauthorized Booking.com from accessing their website.
The part that annoys me is the losses are redacted [1]. Judging by the length of the redaction its much more than the $5000 they were ultimately awarded. I'm also very unclear what harm will actually befall Ryanair if the losses weren't redacted.
I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t kept up very closely with the movements in scraping legality, but my impression was that it was ruled in the past few years that if it’s on the public internet with no login-wall being circumvented, then CFAA isn’t applicable? I seem to recall a collective sigh of relief around some of those rulings.
As I understand it, scraping data read-only is fine (Google Flights, Skyscanner etc) but using automated processes to book tickets on behalf of customers without sending them to the Ryanair site is not fine.
Yeah, it's not a terribly well-written article, and _Ryanair_ is certainly trying to push the line that this is about scraping, but it's hard to imagine that the _resale_ thing wasn't a significant part of the case.
If the ruling (which I haven't read) says automated booking via screen scraping is illegal: wouldn't a workaround be to replace the automated process with a human in a low-cost country?
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 ruling, and continuing to charge their customers for that service?
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"
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.
In fact I wrote my own RyanAir scraper to get the best prices on flights (it is trivial to implement, they barely have any rate limits - in particular if you use the API endpoint where you search for flights departing from a specific airport).
But I guess my scraping is a lot less, as I'm only looking for a few flights
However, interpreting this data properly is decidedly nontrivial (>1M LoC).
Pricing does not imply booking is OK, though. And even circa 1999, Southwest hassled us (ITA Software) about even showing their fares, without us offering any way to book any flights on any carrier.
Displaying the fares in a separate website isn’t the problem. The resale of tickets is, since other aggregators need to pay Ryanair a license fee to resell, and Booking is avoiding that by using RPA
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.
Booking.com BV is a Dutch Company which has subsidiaries all over the world but is also itself a subsidiary of Booking Holdings Group which also owns Priceline, Kayak, OpenTable and quite a few more companies.
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.
It depends, right? In case of Booking, aren’t other subsidiaries also selling airline tickets? It would be reasonable for all those sites to have a common platform for data and that means the holding company is the right target to sue.
Did I miss something about what the term "internet piracy" means? From TFA:
> "We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.
I thought piracy was distributing unauthorized copies of things like music and videos. Wouldn't booking.com's actions be closer to unauthorized ticket brokering?
I guess if you want to demonize someone for doing something you don't like it sounds worse to be labeled a "pirate" than an "unauthorized broker."
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.
Issue was that Kiwi pocketed refounds, would not inform customers of flight changes, changing baggage was very hard...
Ryanair service is OK (if you take it as a bus company). There do no play dead as Airbnb support. During covid they provided refunds sooner than Lufthanza for example.
I don't think screen scraping should be illegal unless there is a form in the way requiring interactive acceptance of terms.
Of course, now with AI that's a different story, but barring AI scraping a page for data should not be illegal just because the company wants to sell you API access.
I suspect there are lots of details and context absent from this article. It's hard to believe this is only about booking.com scraping Ryanair's website. What part of it was "unauthorized", exactly? While it's generally legal in the US to scrape publicly available information, that doesn't translate scraping info that requires logging into an account first.
It seems the bigger issue at hand may be booking.com purchasing the tickets and adding a lot of hidden fees on top.
I had always assumed Booking.com had some resale agreement with hotels and airlines - there was always some weird issue where if I called a hotel and asked for a room it was more expensive than booking.com or was not available yet was on booking.com
What gets me is why on Earth any provider would allow this - dealing direct is so much more sane 99% of the time, and a package holiday provider already has a reseller agreement.
Just stomp booking.com into the ground - I simply don’t understand why hotels and airlines don’t do it?
No that’s the search engine trap - which hotel shall I go to is a map not a search page. It’s a marketing exercise - which influencer, which email drop, which word of mouth.
It’s everything that was before Google captured all the advertising revenue there ever was. And reduced it to a list on a black ink on white page
Airlines are in a race to the bottom because there are only 8 bits in the 1970s booking system so there is only a competition on seat price. Chnage that to be able to have different parameters and we compete on other factors
If hotels are just competing for price on booking.com then they are heading to the same trap - beautiful architecture, fantastic location, smiling staff, 1950s movie stars making films in the courtyard- none of it matters if it’s price per room in NYC.
The only way cows stop being treated like cattle is to make sure every human sees them as individuals - it’s a lot of work. But the struggle is worth the abbatoir.
Hotel owners like working with booking, and yes, they have resale agreements with all hotels and other accommodation providers they list on their website.
Can someone clarify what "access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation" actually means? Are they referring to programmatic account creation?
I'd love to read the full text of the judgement, as the news articles and press releases are vague as to how the ruling was reached.
My assumption is that the issue was not about automation/scraping, but rather, the way in which booking.com engaged in scraping amounted to some kind of fraud.
You can fly for not a lot of money on Ryanair, their fee structure, website, and app are similar to all other budget airlines. Those extra fees are for handling your luggage (extra manpower and fuel). If you want to complain about Ryanair's fees, get hold of the Fees Schedule for the airport you fly from and to. You will learn how much airports charge for landing, parking, hangarage, handling, fuel, etc. It's an eye-opening read.
Ryanair's claim was that Booking.com etc was reselling its seats, adding its own charges on top, and providing false passenger details. It's in Ryanair's interest to portray this as basically a screen scraping case (because Ryanair don't like screen scraping in general), but there does seem to be more to it than just that.
Ryanair relies on dark patterns and brainwashing as part of the checkout process to sell you hotels, insurance, car hire, etc. Those feed into their income stream.
If you bypass that process they don't make their profit.
I still don't understand, I flew with them last year, and just now I dry-ran booking a flight from Prague to Bologna. The entire thing feels quite streamlined and straightforward. Pick two dates, you're offered flights on or around the dates, you pick the flights, then you pick the "package" (basic, regular, plus, flexi plus) and it shows a HUGE matrix with big fat check marks for stuff you get and no check marks for stuff you DON'T GET (reserved seats, cabin luggage, checked luggage, free check-in at the airport). Honestly, if someone can't navigate the process as it is today, I'd be worried about them traveling to a foreign country. Any additional offers (hotels, insurance, cars) you can safely ignore.
Yes, in their defense, that matrix is an improvement. Though it's not perfect and still intended to fool people: you would expect as you go up the tiers that everything from the previous tier is included but that's not the case: "Plus" doesn't include a carry-on/priority boarding from the "Regular" fare. And the most expensive option "Flexi Plus" doesn't include a checked bag (easy to miss when all other options are included)
I am not sure what "dark patterns and brainwashing" are you referring to, I booked flights through Norwegian- a calm scandinavian low cost company, and had to say no many times to car and hotel offers. The same when renting cars from big companies.
Lets say 20% of people booking through ryanair and paying £30 for a flight go for their "upselling" (which is deliberatly designed to get more people to add it). That makes ryanair £50 each. That pushes the revenue per customer upto £40.
Lets say the cost is £35, and thus ryanair makes £5 profit per passenger.
Now lets say someone else comes along as sells the ryanair flight for £30 and has their own "upselling": "Click here to not avoid missing out on our great protection package" etc. Ryanair now is making a £5 loss on each ticket sold, and the reseller is making it instead.
> the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.
AFAIK, it's impossible to resell flight tickets in EU, they are attached to real names that are checked upon boarding time.
If wonder how did Booking manage to resell Ryanair tickets at scale?
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.
[the airline, Europe's largest by passenger numbers, has in recent years launched a series of legal actions against third-party booking platforms that resell its tickets without permission.
It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.]
If you play the whackamole game with IP blocking and captchas, you'll be playing it forever. A court ruling against the practice is much more effective.
> If you search on google you are also agreeing to their terms, there just isn’t a checkbox.
Depends where you are, really. In Europe, where Ryanair does virtually all their business, courts have generally been reluctant to take the "haha, you clicked on the website, you've magically agreed to the license" thing as being particularly meaningful, and recent regulations have cut down the usefulness of EULAs even further.
That said, Ryanair prices aren't login-walled anyway.
> It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.
What it's 'about' (according to one side) and the law involved are 2 separate things.
When I buy something from the supermarket, they add charges and make it difficult for the manufacturer to contact me directly, so that isn't illegal. Many things with bad outcomes are legal.
Breaking the terms of service of the site may be illegal, and if you're mis representing yourself to log in, even more so.
But then you're also moving away from what I would term screen scraping.
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.
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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 or other service aspects, 3. Add your own profit. I don't think this sets any precedent against scraping on its own.
(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.)