Expedia Against 'Search Discrimination'... Unless It Gets To Do The Discriminating

from the hello-hypocrites dept

You may have heard about the "controversy" over the last few weeks, concerning American Airlines' decision to pull out of Orbitz, the online travel booking site (we covered how American Airlines has wanted to do this for years, and was finally allowed to go through with it). Almost immediately after that happened, Orbitz competitor Expedia apparently decided to "punish" American Airlines by first hiding AA results in Expedia's own search and then dropping AA altogether. While this kind of "solidarity" with a competitor might raise some collusion questions, an even bigger issue is that it lays out Expedia's blatant hypocrisy on the question of "search discrimination."

That's because Expedia is a leading member of a lobbying group called FairSearch, which was set up mainly to protest Google's planned acquisition of ITA. Both sides on that fight have been bombarding me with press releases/articles on a near daily basis, all of which I've ignored, because it's a silly fight. However, considering that Expedia is one of the main members of the group, and one of the key points that the group is supposedly fighting for is protesting "search discrimination," the whole thing rings a little hypocritical. From the FairSearch website:

TRANSPARENCY: Consumers -- not search engines -- should choose winners in the marketplace. Consumers benefit from more choices in the search marketplace competing to win users, innovating to improve products and displaying results transparently. When search providers engage in search discrimination -- manipulating search results to promote a favored product and punish competitors -- consumers pay the price.

This comes just one paragraph above a nice Expedia logo: Yup. So, just as Expedia, in an attempt to complain about Google, claims it's against search providers discriminating by manipulating results to promote or punish certain players, it's doing so in a way that's significantly more noticeable than anything Google is doing. I agree with Eric Goldman that Expedia should be able to set up its search engine however it wants, even if it means making life worse off for customers by hiding certain results purely as retaliation to a company it doesn't like. There's choice in the marketplace, and this move means that I'm much less likely to use Expedia. But to complain about this exact form of discrimination, while doing it in a way that's much more noticeable than the one you're complaining about? That's pure, unadulterated hypocrisy. Way to go Expedia.

All that said, I'm a bit confused about this entire dispute. What's to stop Orbitz from simply getting American Airlines fares from wherever it wants to get them and including them? The data is factual data, not subject to American Airlines' control, so I don't even see how AA can legally stop Orbitz from including it. The real issue, it seems, is that AA wants Orbitz and others to get their data directly, rather than via middlemen, but the way to do that is to make it easy for the travel search engines to do that in a way that's more convenient and cheaper than getting it through any middlemen. Not sure why that requires a legal dispute...

Filed Under: search discrimination, travel
Companies: american airlines, expedia, fairsearch