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Comment by victorbjorklund | Hacker News Reader

Knowing your competiotions pricing doesnt make ot a cartel. It is the agreement between compeotitors to regulate price that makes it a cartel. If I have a saas in industry X and I see that all my competitors price their saas between Y and Z usd/month. Then it isnt a cartel if I price my saas similar.

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Knowing pricing is enough to distort markets when the prices are not visible to the other players like buyers. The same thing happens in recruiting where companies share compensation data through through third parties, which removes real supply and demand dynamics because companies will stick to the data they have signaled to each other this way.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. The weak point was that the software supposedly required some action to deviate from the suggested price and required some degree of adherence to the price. I don't have the software myself so I can't say how much of this is blown up and how much real, but that definitely seems like it makes things problematic.

if I own a ecommerce in a comepetive niche and I write a script to automatically adjust my price of my competitors lower/increase the price it is not a cartel. Only if I actually make an agreement with them.

Both parties made an agreement with the software maker to not deviate, in effect forming a cartel.

Yes, and that last one is what's being alleged.

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