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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

If it's illegal to fix prices by collaboration, it should also be illegal to fix prices by implicit collaboration.

I'm under the impression this would be clearly illegal if all these rental companies got in a room with some pencils and calculators and binders full of price data to do the same thing. Why is it different if they do that via a middleman?

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It's not - the FTC released a statement on this very topic a few months ago: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fix...

We won't really know the answer until SCOTUS rules on it.

We already know the answer. The question is, will the supreme Court allow a monopoly price setter anyways?

I don’t see this even making it to SCOTUS unless there’s a circuit split somewhere.

If that's true then NIMBYism is also collaboration to inflate property prices. Perhaps we should also be cracking down on the policies that restrict supply despite such obviously high, and rich, demand.

Is it any better if the data is scraped from public sources and sold as a real-time analytics tool?

I strongly believe so, the same way a business can check competitors' prices. If it's public, it's fair game.

Note: I am biased, I'm working on a platform that does exactly that, taking an orthogonal direction to real estate analytics: https://www.hellodata.ai. Using 100% public data.

>Why is it different if they do that via a middleman?

Because injecting a middleman into the situation creates a facade of plausible deniability. Obviously, such deniability is complete nonsense to anyone with eyes and a brain, but here we are.

Why is the very existence of such a middleman not illegal? I'm sure their sales pitch is more subtle than "we'll help you get away with price fixing", but it should be obvious that the effect is the same.

Paying someone to perform a market analysis to help you determine how much to charge is an incredibly normal thing to do. It only becomes illegal collusion when enough people are paying that single person that they start being able to control the market.

What you may call a facade of plausible deniability others would call racketeering.

There are laws against this kind of behavior what is lacking is sufficient enforcement of them.

I figured doing so would be a tad too on-the-nose in my original post, but yes, it is a clear cut case of racketeering, if not outright fraud.

Agree completely regarding lack of sufficient enforcement. Honestly we could use a serious wave of RICO enforcement at the highest level in this country, targeting (but not limited to) pharma giants, major "healthcare" and & insurance companies, big banks, etc.

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