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EU Commission Designates Booking as a Gatekeeper

Hugsun 2y ago
This is great. Booking has a massive share of the hotel booking market. It will be interesting to see how they will be made to comply. The times I've used it have been fine, although aggressively advertising car rental for a stay in downtown Copenhagen is hilariously out of touch.
- Loic 2y ago
  They advertise car rental even in places 50km away from any rental stations. I am using it quite a lot even so one need to navigate a lot of dark patterns to book something.
- multimoon 2y ago
  If your experience has been fine, then clearly they aren’t doing anything inherently bad in a way that hurts the consumer, why would you want them to be hit with additional regulation? I’d also argue they aren’t a gatekeeper to begin with because there is a lot of competition in this space. Regulation for the sake of regulation isn’t a good thing and my personal view as someone on the other side of the pond watching the fallout is that this gatekeeper thing is overreach. Apple is a great example of this.
  - piva00 2y ago
    You just shared your personal opinion without an argument why exactly you think it's overreach. As far as I can see it's not regulation for regulation sake, if you read the EU directives it's quite clear why the Commission and Parliament decided on bringing those regulations into place. Would be good if you could cite what you think is wrong with their reasoning.
    - multimoon 2y ago
      Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a large share of a given market segment. This feels like punishing companies for having a better (or at least better marketed) product than the rest. The gatekeepers are like forcing me to sell my competitors branded food from my store where my store is wildly more successful because I offer a better shopping experience. My business model in providing a better shopping experience revolves around selling my own food - I can vertically integrate this and make profit margins in places that another store might not be able to. Interfering with that harms both the experience to the consumer and that business as a whole which wasn’t doing anything wrong.
      - piva00 2y ago
        > Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a large share of a given market segment. This feels like punishing companies for having a better (or at least better marketed) product than the rest. You are completely ignoring network effects in all of this. A company might not have the best product but since it has most market penetration/capture (which doesn't mean it's the best product, aside from some spherical cow-type of model) it can curtail most of the competition or simply buy it to stamp it out. While also imposing a very high bar of anti-competition behaviour ignoring that it can be achieved through salami slicing tactics. Gatekeepers are of a size where they exert so much market power that it's not realistic for smaller business to compete with them even if they provide a potentially more valuable service to some customers of the behemoth. One has to abide by the rules of these market giants. Example: Amazon competing with its sellers on its own marketplace, they can simply price dump their competitors since they don't have to pay a merchant fee to themselves, they can extract the data about best selling products and create an Amazon Basics version of it that will inevitably be cheaper than their competition. That's not a fair market practice. Another example: Apple can bundle their services and sell through the App Store without paying the 30% fee to themselves, inevitably making their products more profitable (and potentially cheaper) than the competition simply because they are a gatekeeper. > The gatekeepers are like forcing me to sell my competitors branded food from my store where my store is wildly more successful because I offer a better shopping experience. No, you are a small fish, you don't exert so much power in the market, it's not about you, it's about a very different league of business than you are. I think that's the part you don't understand, with different sizes probably it's best to have different rules because of how much power they can hold, you are trying to apply a simple model very broadly when it's not how real markets work. Even if you don't agree with Yanis Varoufakis I thoroughly recommend reading "Technofeudalism" to get some insights, at least to challenge the thesis, it's worth a read to understand what happens when these companies become gatekeepers creating their own fiefdoms.
  - Hugsun 2y ago
    I agree that regulation needs to justify itself. I haven't had any issue with any of the DMA rulings so far and I have greatly appreciated many of them. For that reason I trust the commission setting these rules to have imposed fair and consumer friendly rules on Booking with their gatekeeper designation. They might of course be unjust but I don't expect them to be. If they are I would like to hear about it though. What is your issue with the Apple gatekeeper designation?
pjc50 2y ago
@dang Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40351249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40351249
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  Thanks, that one also uses the correct company name, "Booking.com" (the parent company is "Booking Group"), so the headline isn't confusing. This headline makes it sound like a the EU is "designating" a definition of a noun. It'd be like if a headline said "EU Sues Privacy" when referring to Privacy.COM.
  - zvr 2y ago
    I thought the parent company was "Booking Holdings Inc." (NASDAQ: BKNG).
    - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
      You are correct, thanks!
Y_Y 2y ago
This refers to the company running booking.com, rather than some generic notion of booking as the title might imply.
- greggsy 2y ago
  I was hoping it might have been referring to Ticketek
carlosjobim 2y ago
So this "gatekeeper" stuff doesn't seem to have any similarity to American antitrust laws or European laws for fair market competition. What is the purpose? Booking is a gatekeeper because many accommodation providers are too lazy and incompetent to sell their rooms themselves. So are airbnb. The 15% charge is the fee you pay for refusing to do your job and a reminder that you are not good enough.
- pjc50 2y ago
  A clearinghouse is valuable in and of itself, not some weird accusation of "laziness" on the part of individual market participants.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Your goal as an accommodation provider is to sell all your rooms by yourself, and use third party sellers only to fill in the gaps. That takes work, and that's why it's your job. But many people think that their job is to sign the mortgage to buy a hotel or B&B, maybe hire some staff and then customers will appear out of thin air. Then grind their teeth at booking charging 15% for actually doing their job.
- sebstefan 2y ago
  I don't go on booking.com by virtue of how good it is, I go on booking.com because every hotel has a page there It's a gateway between businesses and consumers, got popular because they got on the market at the right time, is ingrained because their users have reached critical mass and are giving it momentum, so of course it needs to be regulated as such
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    You can just as easily find hotels in the region you're looking for, using Google Maps. Or you can browse listings, do a web search. Booking.com doesn't force any hotel to list with them. Their success is because customers find them reliable and practical. That comes with a cost, which is 15%. Hotels have to specifically opt in. And of course Booking.com is already regulated. What I'm trying to ask is what is the purpose of the "gatekeeper" designation?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tiborsaas 2y ago
Can someone please recommend a decent platform which is not Booking or AirBnb for Southeast Asia?

This is great. Booking has a massive share of the hotel booking market. It will be interesting to see how they will be made to comply. The times I've used it have been fine, although aggressively advertising car rental for a stay in downtown Copenhagen is hilariously out of touch.

Loic 2y ago
They advertise car rental even in places 50km away from any rental stations. I am using it quite a lot even so one need to navigate a lot of dark patterns to book something.
multimoon 2y ago
If your experience has been fine, then clearly they aren’t doing anything inherently bad in a way that hurts the consumer, why would you want them to be hit with additional regulation? I’d also argue they aren’t a gatekeeper to begin with because there is a lot of competition in this space. Regulation for the sake of regulation isn’t a good thing and my personal view as someone on the other side of the pond watching the fallout is that this gatekeeper thing is overreach. Apple is a great example of this.
- piva00 2y ago
  You just shared your personal opinion without an argument why exactly you think it's overreach. As far as I can see it's not regulation for regulation sake, if you read the EU directives it's quite clear why the Commission and Parliament decided on bringing those regulations into place. Would be good if you could cite what you think is wrong with their reasoning.
  - multimoon 2y ago
    Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a large share of a given market segment. This feels like punishing companies for having a better (or at least better marketed) product than the rest. The gatekeepers are like forcing me to sell my competitors branded food from my store where my store is wildly more successful because I offer a better shopping experience. My business model in providing a better shopping experience revolves around selling my own food - I can vertically integrate this and make profit margins in places that another store might not be able to. Interfering with that harms both the experience to the consumer and that business as a whole which wasn’t doing anything wrong.
    - piva00 2y ago
      > Unless a company is being anticompetitive and actively blocking other entries into the same market, then they shouldn’t be punished with regulation for having a large share of a given market segment. This feels like punishing companies for having a better (or at least better marketed) product than the rest. You are completely ignoring network effects in all of this. A company might not have the best product but since it has most market penetration/capture (which doesn't mean it's the best product, aside from some spherical cow-type of model) it can curtail most of the competition or simply buy it to stamp it out. While also imposing a very high bar of anti-competition behaviour ignoring that it can be achieved through salami slicing tactics. Gatekeepers are of a size where they exert so much market power that it's not realistic for smaller business to compete with them even if they provide a potentially more valuable service to some customers of the behemoth. One has to abide by the rules of these market giants. Example: Amazon competing with its sellers on its own marketplace, they can simply price dump their competitors since they don't have to pay a merchant fee to themselves, they can extract the data about best selling products and create an Amazon Basics version of it that will inevitably be cheaper than their competition. That's not a fair market practice. Another example: Apple can bundle their services and sell through the App Store without paying the 30% fee to themselves, inevitably making their products more profitable (and potentially cheaper) than the competition simply because they are a gatekeeper. > The gatekeepers are like forcing me to sell my competitors branded food from my store where my store is wildly more successful because I offer a better shopping experience. No, you are a small fish, you don't exert so much power in the market, it's not about you, it's about a very different league of business than you are. I think that's the part you don't understand, with different sizes probably it's best to have different rules because of how much power they can hold, you are trying to apply a simple model very broadly when it's not how real markets work. Even if you don't agree with Yanis Varoufakis I thoroughly recommend reading "Technofeudalism" to get some insights, at least to challenge the thesis, it's worth a read to understand what happens when these companies become gatekeepers creating their own fiefdoms.
- Hugsun 2y ago
  I agree that regulation needs to justify itself. I haven't had any issue with any of the DMA rulings so far and I have greatly appreciated many of them. For that reason I trust the commission setting these rules to have imposed fair and consumer friendly rules on Booking with their gatekeeper designation. They might of course be unjust but I don't expect them to be. If they are I would like to hear about it though. What is your issue with the Apple gatekeeper designation?

pjc50 2y ago

@dang Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40351249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40351249

ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
Thanks, that one also uses the correct company name, "Booking.com" (the parent company is "Booking Group"), so the headline isn't confusing. This headline makes it sound like a the EU is "designating" a definition of a noun. It'd be like if a headline said "EU Sues Privacy" when referring to Privacy.COM.
- zvr 2y ago
  I thought the parent company was "Booking Holdings Inc." (NASDAQ: BKNG).
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    You are correct, thanks!

Y_Y 2y ago

This refers to the company running booking.com, rather than some generic notion of booking as the title might imply.

greggsy 2y ago
I was hoping it might have been referring to Ticketek

carlosjobim 2y ago

So this "gatekeeper" stuff doesn't seem to have any similarity to American antitrust laws or European laws for fair market competition. What is the purpose? Booking is a gatekeeper because many accommodation providers are too lazy and incompetent to sell their rooms themselves. So are airbnb. The 15% charge is the fee you pay for refusing to do your job and a reminder that you are not good enough.

pjc50 2y ago
A clearinghouse is valuable in and of itself, not some weird accusation of "laziness" on the part of individual market participants.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Your goal as an accommodation provider is to sell all your rooms by yourself, and use third party sellers only to fill in the gaps. That takes work, and that's why it's your job. But many people think that their job is to sign the mortgage to buy a hotel or B&B, maybe hire some staff and then customers will appear out of thin air. Then grind their teeth at booking charging 15% for actually doing their job.
sebstefan 2y ago
I don't go on booking.com by virtue of how good it is, I go on booking.com because every hotel has a page there It's a gateway between businesses and consumers, got popular because they got on the market at the right time, is ingrained because their users have reached critical mass and are giving it momentum, so of course it needs to be regulated as such
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  You can just as easily find hotels in the region you're looking for, using Google Maps. Or you can browse listings, do a web search. Booking.com doesn't force any hotel to list with them. Their success is because customers find them reliable and practical. That comes with a cost, which is 15%. Hotels have to specifically opt in. And of course Booking.com is already regulated. What I'm trying to ask is what is the purpose of the "gatekeeper" designation?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tiborsaas 2y ago

Can someone please recommend a decent platform which is not Booking or AirBnb for Southeast Asia?