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Comment by RestlessMind | Hacker News Reader

From [1]: "On April 8, 2011, the US Department of Justice approved the buyout (of ITA by Google). As part of the agreement, Google must license ITA software to other websites for five years."

Now that five years are up, Google would want to deny competitors access to that data. Seems like a good startup opportunity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

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Reminds me a few google employers posts on HN responding to the usual 'google closes products often': we dont, and we never closed a business products, only unimportant consumer ones.

Yeah, sure.

Google is heading Microsoft 199x way - fastly becoming public enemy no 1.

Cute language. So just to be clear, you're putting Google ahead of North Korea, ISIS, et al on the list of threats to humanity?

I think it's odd to even include ISIS on any list of "threats to humanity." How many orders of magnitude could more damage could Google do by accident compared to ISIS?

Not even mentioning ISIS was created by the CIA. The US is the largest state sponsor of terrorism, but private internet megacorps are the biggest threat to freedom of speech. They're both pretty bad threats, just in very different ways.

In this context, I intended "threat to humanity" to mean "a clear and present danger to the safety and security of human beings."

ISIS very intentionally kills people opposed to its goals. Google, by comparison, does not.

Whether Google is the origin story of a 1984-like dystopia is another question entirely.

Clearly the OP meant in the context of anticompetitive action the tech industry, not including foreign (at war) countries that have concentration camps. This kind of snark really takes away from the discussion.

How is ISIS top 2 on your list of threats to humanity? They are at best a regional threat. Google can do considerably more damage on a global scale.

The two examples I gave were not the top two, nor in any particular order.

However, they do make a practice of killing people, which Google does not.

Also, the elimination of a minor API is hardly a globally-damaging action.

Why is North Korea a threat to humanity?

A possibility exists that North Korea might be able to bait someone into a nuclear war.

I think this is highly unlikely. There's simply no point. NK needs nuclear weapons to stave off possible US invasion. They are not crazy people. Crazy people can't create nuclear weapons just to randomly kill people for no reason.

Come on, I have no sympathy for NK's regime, but that's victim blaming.

The threat is "baiting someone into nuclear war" and not "having tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and being ready to use them to kill millions of people"? Give me an effing break mate :)

Good heavens, this is exactly the kind of thing the guidelines refer to here:

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Seems like a good startup opportunity.

Last time this was brought up (2011 HN article IIRC), it was discussed how terribly organised the travel industry is and just how much Smart Work ITA did and how invaluable it was.

Relevant threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2424592

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2992660

(Algolia's HN search is invaluable: https://hn.algolia.com/ )

TLDR: Not a startup opportunity.

- Huge collection of proprietary data which is constantly updated, only intended to be polled in a certain way and has all kinds of poorly structured exceptions and routing problems.

- The booking engines provide good access to their pricing data free of charge under license to affiliates that book flights through their engine

- Low value of an API for prices alone and slim chance of acquisition by Google or the big online travel agents

ITA built exceptional technology rather than an exceptional business.

This API that Google killed presumably because it wasn't making enough revenue to be worth maintaining was the part of ITA's public facing service they originally claimed to be "very excited" about at the acquisition stage

seems a little bit more than 5 years...

I wonder if this was five years from the deal closing? Usually the deal doesn't close until after regulators have agreed to not to file a lawsuit (which is what happened on the April 8th 2011 date).

That still implies it took them 2 years to close the deal (2018-5=2013) which seems a bit much.

> Now that five years are up

2018 - 2011 = 7?

7 > 5, so the 5 years are up.

They've been up for 2 years, so how is it "Now that five years are up, Google would want to deny competitors access to that data"? If that was their reasoning they would've done it 2 years ago. It's 2 years of extra advantage they didn't need to give their competitors, right?

If that was their reasoning, they could do it whenever they were ready and willing after five years. So this explains why they had to do it for five years and might explain why they won't be doing it much longer than that. It might also indicate that cutting off the API was intended but not urgent.

Why would it be so close to the anniversary though? It seems to suggest something else might be going on at the 7-year mark.

Perhaps some people thought you were only nitpicking but I agree and I think it was useful that you asked about this so that we got the discussion leading to a better answer.

Now that the five years are up and Google Flights just started facilitating actual airfare purchases (a recent development)

Okay, that second part finally explains it, thanks for that. I had a hunch the five years having been up 2 years ago didn't tell nearly the whole story (though apparently people think I'm crazy for thinking that).

Well, the question is why did Google wait the 2 non-required years before shutting it down? Seems like something they wouldn’t just forget about.

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