American Airlines sues travel website Skiplagged over ticket price ‘loophole’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Is this the kind of innovation we want?
Current dynamics for publicly listed companies doom them to provide growth every year - but not only does growth get harder every year - especially when the demographic curve tilts downwards, it also becomes more expensive. 3 nm chips are orders of magnitude harder to improve upon them 5mn chips for example.
VW Dieselgate, Explosing Samsung Phones, CPU Branch prediction vulnerabilities, Boeing planes dropping from the skies, all have things in common - large industry players that have reached serious growth limits and act under pressure to deliver it anyway.
But shareholder doesn’t care. So your only choice eventually for businesses that can’t be improved upon effectively enough to maintain growth (eventually all of them) is to be innovative with fees and, if you’ve monopolized something, exploit that.
Enshittification is built into the system. All good things must become shit over time.
All commercial things are subject to these pressures. Open source projects are not. We need to decomercialize everything that we can.
The open source world is not immune to economic pressures. Even the hobbyist donating code still needs to make a living. Thus it’s possible for some open source projects to still undergo “enshittification” if economic pressures influence the maintainers of these projects accordingly.
The other side of the coin is that commercial software also sucks in general, but users of commercial software often have no choice in the matter and are being held hostage by vendor lock-in.
I know it’s hard to boil down what capitalism is, but to me it seems be markets, competition, incentive-based invisible hands type controls, and flow of capital.
This behavior is really the opposite as it’s really just rent seeking of locking people into your thing and then turning the screws.
I don’t think enshittification is unique or even more likely in capitalism and seems more likely to exist with heavy, conscious regulation as companies will minmax to stay in the rules and make the most money.
So just say “capitalism, sucks eh?” seems to make it harder to correct this behavior. It seems like the current rules we have need fixing to correct against companies limiting their market and locking people in. US airlines aren’t really a good example of “capitalism” since it’s just a few companies with little competition (eg, check out how many airlines really compete over routes and just settle for “united cities” and “delta cities”).
It feels there is always a give and take with controlled systems involving humans. Too much control and the humans rebel. Too little and they humans stagnate.
And you ask about innovation. There's also financial involved in this situation.
In so far as innovation creatively identifying ways to make money, of course it is. This is not the destination, it is merely a waypoint on the path of commerce.
In so far as our relationship to sellers, who are shaping the market, no. I appreciate sellers expressing intention of how their products could be used to derive the most value. Though I also want the freedom to use products in a way that I think might benefit my unaddressed interests. A really simple answer but yeah that's it.
I don't know about you, but I'm happy to accept some limitations on the goods/services I buy if it means I'm saving some money.
This does not appear to be one of those cases.
Even when the value lost exceeds the savings?
You just said that you're happy with limitations if you can save some money.
The article is about them imposing limitations so that you cannot get a cheaper flight. They will set the price and the route, and you do it.
Sure you can argue for convenience for you, but why would you take away freedom from others?
>The article is about them imposing limitations so that you cannot get a cheaper flight. They will set the price and the route, and you do it.
How is this any different than the airlines selling tickets with two prices: the high one that allows you to get off at any point, and a discounted one that's conditional on you promising flying all the way to the final destination?
Some people want to save money going to the intermediate stops.
If you want to go to X, the flight A->X is $1000, or A->X->B is $700.
People are saying you should be able to go on the second flight and ditch. They are saving $300.
1. $1000 "regular" ticket, you could skip any time you want
2. $700 "discounted" ticket, but the airline makes you promise that you won't get off at X
In this case you can't really complain about how airlines are "imposing limitations" or whatever, because you willingly agreed to it as a condition for receiving the discounted ticket. If you secretly wanted to go to X, it'll be even better if you could receive the discount and get off at X, but that violates the agreement you had with the airline, and the airline was only willing to offer the cheaper ticket to you because they thought you were going all the way to B.
Or maybe they could develop services that consumed those abandoned travel segments, allowing people to buy the ticket and explicitly waive the second segment. Maube expand standby services, or some sort of "you can buy a ticket for a package when even Fedex Overnight isn't fast enough for you."
You have three airports A, B, and C.
Airline X has flights to B but most don't. For arbitrary reasons the flight from A to C stops at B.
When pricing tickets flights to B can be more expensive due to lack of competition from other airlines flying into B.
However flights between A and C (which is a popular flight) have to compete against other flights since it is a popular route.
Thus you end up with an expensive midway but a cheap overall ticket.
A has direct flights to B and C for $300. But B is a major hub while C is a random regional destination, and their network has too many staff members or individual aircraft that need to get to B. So one of the A to C flights is scheduled to connect through B, and customers who are willing to take that flight pay only $200 for their inconvenience.
"Skiplaggers", even though they're getting the same service from a user perspective, are defeating the point from a route management perspective. The discount was offered to improve the airline's logistics by reducing the demand for A->C, and if you're on a hidden-city ticket you aren't helping with that.
Wouldn't dream of paying to fly them and only use their miles to fly their partners so I guess they need _some_ boogeyman they can point to for their terrible performance, can't possibly be their management's fault
Am I really going to be prosecuted for committing a felony in this scenario?
49 USC 46504 Applies criminal penalties.
"An individual on an aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States who ... interferes with the performance of the duties of the member or attendant or lessens the ability of the member or attendant to perform those duties, or attempts or conspires to do such an act, shall be fined under title 18, imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both..."
I don't actually think you would be prosecuted for having a zoom call after being asked not to in a general announcement, but I think that if you pushed the matter, you would definitely be flying home on a different carrier. I also don't know if having a zoom call "interferes with crew member duties", but if one of their duties is preventing people from making zoom calls, then arguably yes, it does.
They could tell you to turn off your zoom meeting during landing/takeoff, which is reasonable, because no electronics on during that time, etc, but they couldnt be like "hey pants are illegal on this flight" and then take you down for wearing pants.
Read the actual lawsuit document[1]. They claim that:
1. they violated various ToS clauses of the AA website, which they agreed to by accessing the website to download logos.
2. they're helping other people violate AA's terms of carriage contract by finding them skiplagged tickets, which is illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
3. they infringe on AA's copyright and trademark by using their logo on their site
I won't speak to the validity of each accusation, as that's up to the judge to decide, but superficially they all seem plausible.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.38...
AA will definitely lose on 3, it won't be close.
These are all really weak claims, but:
For one, they will have a lot of trouble showing acceptance of a ToS. It's a loser anyway and they'll likely end up with an antitrust or unfair trade practice counterclaim if they push it too far.
For two, this is a loser even if they can prove most of it (they can't). They would also have to prove the interference happened through an improper method (like blackmail) because the contract can be terminated at will. Even proving intentional interference will not be enough.
This is already basically the hardest tort to prove and I give a near zero chance of success.
It's hard to see this as anything other than a nuisance lawsuit
I think you may be seriously underestimating how many lawsuits most companies face, and then lose (or settle).
For companies worth 1+billion, they average 300+ simultaneous lawsuits per year.
Plaintiffs win about 66% of those when they deal with contracts.
The losing ones (for plaintiffs) are cases like this one :)
I'm not smart enough to understand whatever legalese is in that document.