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Comment by hakanderyal | Hacker News Reader

It's up to the relevant regulators of relevant countries to ensure that doesn't happen. This shouldn't be a barrier for entry.

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Antitrust law is intended to do this. The general algorithm is:

- Company engages in unlawful anticompetitive behavior to drive competitors out-of-business

- A few years later, the FTC starts an investigation

- Competitors go out-of-business

- A few years later, the FTC possibly delivers a slap-on-the-wrist or possibly nothing at all

Microsoft played this game for many years in the eighties and nineties before there were any more serious consequences. They eventually came, but on the whole, Microsoft won big-time on anticompetitive behavior.

And of course, it's only what the FTC can find out about, and their jurisdiction doesn't extend into China, so Apple gets away with a lot of shit that they wouldn't otherwise.

Serious question: What anticompetitive practices do you see Apple engaging in? Especially in China?

I haven't heard of Apple doing much bad there; the only antitrust I've heard of were the issues around the app store, payments, etc.

That's a statement about me and not about Apple.

I'm genuinely curious.

You forgot "company has to super duper swear they won't do it again and issue a public statement about it"

The problem is that if you list on 2 websites at the same time, then these websites cannot guarantee availability anymore, unless there is some protocol to communicate this.

E.g. what if someone books an apartment on website 1, and another person books the same apartment on website 2 at the same time.

Usually hosters that do this are "professional" and have multiple listings or ways to mitigate it. One is tools that auto-update multiple platforms to keep them in-sync, leaving only small "timing" windows where there could be a double booking. Another is to simply phone the renter and offer another place (if they have multiples right next to eachother which is often the case), or give some sort of discount, etc.

Essentially, it's a "solved" problem at this point and is on the level of being a commodity.

Isn't contacting the renter and offering an alternate location a sure sign of a rental scam in the first place?

This is a somewhat solved problem by hotel reservation platforms. Responsibility to notify the platform about availability changes are on the property owners. They pay some fines or (some other form of cost) if they have to cancel a reservation due to clashes.

There is an ecosystem of third party tools that communicate calendar availability between platforms to help solve this problem

Seems like a technical problem that could be solved, if they want to

Of course the incumbents (Airbnb) will forever try to stall the development and adoption of it.

Of course this is a solved problem. Even cheap booking systems manage and synchronise a whole bunch of different booking platforms. Tourism is a multi trillion dollar industry.

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