Regulation

[The Google logo can be seen on a building at the company headquarters. Andrej Sokolow/dpa]

A digression which was kicked off by a piece in Edge from MSN - 'Google ends hotel search test after compliance with EU law backfires' - about one of the ramifications of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), summarised at reference 1. Reasonably old news, seemingly kicked off by the blogpost from Google at reference 3 from about three weeks ago.

Having long been irritated by the way that searches for hotels are presented by the big search engines - I try to book through hotel sites rather than through intermediaries where possible - I thought I would take a look.

The Google story at reference 3 seems to be that the changes looked for by the middle sized intermediaries resulted in direct bookings to hotels going down and bookings through said intermediaries going up. Which was bad for the hotels and good for the intermediaries. And bad for the end customers. So they are not going to roll-out the latest changes, recently tested in parts of Europe. Another part of the Google story is the large amount of time and effort that they have spent trying comply with the DMA, trying to reach the best balance between the various interests - including, not least, their own.

Presumably all part of why a large chunk of hi-tech backed Trump. The president-elect being a great one for making bonfires of regulations - although his leverage over EU rather than US regulations is hopefully limited.

PS 1: for Sokolow, not the chess player with a similar name, see reference 2.

PS 2: the people providing the summary at reference 4 belong to the Indian travel services company at reference 5. Another interested party!

PS 3: Google continues (this Friday morning) to fail to find any of my posts with the long search key, although it does manage a few images with seemingly random keys which start in a similar way, for example reference 7. While Bing does quite well, turning up several such posts in its first page of hits. Which also, for some reason which I have yet to fathom, includes reference 6.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act.

Reference 2: https://www.presseportal.de/en/pm/8218/5609084.

Reference 3: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/dma-compliance-update/. 

Reference 4: https://www.myhotelshop.com/blog/the-digital-markets-act-dma-and-its-impact-on-the-hotel-industry. More background, turned up by Bing.

Reference 5: https://rategain.com/.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service).

Reference 7: https://youtu.be/h0THIPpyx9w. The work of a geek who is also a fan of football?