Beholden To Lobbyists, Congress Tries To Serve Up Unsuspecting Passengers To Expedia

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About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. What kind of moron would believe that using the word “airman” in any way discourages women to become pilots?

  2. I’m no fan of Expedia but Google needs to be broken up rather than accruing even more power. Yes, it’s impressive that Expedia looks like chump change in the evil department but Google just has a gift at making other horrible corporations look like pikers.

  3. Google is evil because of its evil leadership and most of its leftist workers. It needs to be broken up to protect conservatives because Google and other leftist firms prevent conservatives from creating their own platforms through monopolistic control that will just deplatform any conservative site that actually gets big from ads/payments/funding/use of software.

    However, restricting speech is unacceptable. It’s crazy that Google could be compelled by the government to curb its speech (not being able to put its own search results first on its own platform ). The 1st amendment and free speech takes precedence over our hate for Google.

  4. @Jackson Waterson
    Jack, you need to correct yourself. It’s “Your hate for Google”. Speak for yourself.
    If Google only has leftist workers then they have been incredibly successful leaving your
    paranoid ass behind
    Jack, when are you going to move to Europe and join your white rascist ancestors?

  5. American used to do something similar with SABRE, they intentionally downgraded results of competitors, since they knew that travel agents were lazy and often booked the top result and almost always booked off the first page of results. New York Air, which had substantially lower prices than AA, were put on the last page, where travel agents rarely found them. Congress eventually outlawed the practice.

    The problem with the near monopoly Google has is that they appear to be a neutral arbiter of information when in reality they are not neutral and are instead shifting business to their own businesses or people who pay them to be at the top. One could argue that they have the free speech rights to do that, but one can also argue that they are engaged in duplicitous and anti-competitive behavior. I tend to be a pretty strong advocate of free speech rights and I like a lot of Google’s products, but even I am increasing worried about Google’s behavior – it’s time to either regulate them as a utility in that they are a common carrier or engage in anti-trust action and break them up.

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