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Court Demands American Airlines List Its Flights On Orbitz
schwit1 writes "American Airlines, which removed its flights from Orbitz.com late last year, was ordered by a Chicago court on Thursday to allow the travel site access to its flight and fare information. American Airlines filed an anti-trust suit against Travelport in December, claiming that the company, which owns just under half of Orbitz's shares and runs the service compiling fare information for travel site, was trying to control the sale of tickets. Before the lawsuit, a considerable amount of American's revenue had been coming from tickets booked through Orbitz and Travelport."
Maybe I'm misinterpreting the article, but what is up with a business (AA) being forced to use a specific third party processor owned by a competitor and paying for the "privilege" in this manner. AA is the originator of the information and it should be at their discretion to which global distribution systems they publish it to According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_reservations_system) there are a handful of systems. The top two each serve just under half of the U.S. market share, one of which is created by American Airlines. The next largest is Travelport's "Worldspan" which is used by Orbitz.
There are 10 types of cliches in this world. Those that are new, and those that aren't.
I hate reading press accounts of court decisions that provide no useful information on what exactly the court was ruling on or how it reached its decision. Without this information, we have no idea if this decision was as broad as whether all airlines must list with central clearing houses (and why), as short-term / technical as over a paperwork error resulting in a temporary win for Orbitz until corrected by AA, or about something else altogether (ie there was a previously agreed to contract between the two companies that was still valid and that AA was trying to terminate early without sufficient justification.)
To be sure wait until the court decision is linked before forming any opinions, or at the very least until an article presents a credible explanation of what the issue being litigated is and how the court ruled on it.
There's absolutely no such thing as a Free Market. There is, by extension, no such thing as Free Trade either.
True- in the real world there probably can never be absolutely free markets or trade. And by your logic there's no such thing as free speech or equality under the law, but just because we can't actually have them doesn't mean that they can't be ideals that we strive to emulate or guidelines for our legal system. In the same way I'll never manage to be perfectly honest or rational, but that doesn't mean that I can't attempt to avoid lying or try to overcome my biases.
At least with proper democratic governments, the laws are more subject to the will of the governed. ... it's still better than having the laws set by kings, warlords, and mob bosses.
Right - there will always be the organized use of force in the world, but as you pointed out some methods of organization are preferable to others. As part of the governed, I summarize my preference for regulations to be few over many, necessary over unnecessary, clear over vague, evenly over unevenly applied, etc as "I am generally in favor of free markets". I think that can be just as clear as your preference for democracy.
Or you could read the article and see that American Airlines had a contract, and that the court is just forcing them to abide by it.
Libertarians believe in necessary regulation. Those which don't simply don't know they aren't libertarians but anarchists. We DO have names for these things; you are hereby invited to use the proper ones.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"