Here Are Travel's Big Winners in an Antitrust Crackdown on Big Tech

Suddenly there is a glimmer of hope that the travel industry can get some relief from nearly mandatory fees: paying for ads in Google search and in its hotel and flights shopping services to get visibility. That's because Google, Facebook, and Amazon could reportedly face tough antitrust enforcement from U.S. regulators, as well as an inquiry by the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee. The U.S. Department of Justice would take a look at Google's business practices from a competition perspective while the U.S. Federal Trade Commission could take on Facebook and Amazon. If Google, for example, were forced not to place its own travel businesses such as Google Hotels and Google Flights, recently consolidated into travel.google.com, high up in search results to the detriment of competitors' travel offerings, a wide swath of travel companies, from Expedia and Booking.com to Trivago and Kayak, could benefit. Depending on the shape of any antitrust remedies — and the teeth would be in the details — hotel brands seeking direct bookings and travel startups begging to get noticed could be rewarded. A precise answer would be impossible to come up with because we don't know how harsh a crackdown might be, and which aspects of Google's business practices might be reined in. Google, after all, has faced relatively large fines in Europe over the practices of its retail shopping business, but the effectiveness has been called into question. Max Rayner, a partner at Hudson Crossing, believes that one of Big Tech's arguments that its practices enhance competition and save consumers money doesn't hold up to scrutiny. He argues that platforms such as Google and Amazon force businesses to pay "rent." "The rent-seeking regulatory analysis presents the greatest danger to big tech because its main defense against antitrust charges has reasonably been that there's no evidence of rising prices that hurt consumers, and hence no monopolistic behavior," Rayner said. "Regulators appear to be poised to go beyond that question and to start asking whether big tech companies are extracting 'rents' indirectly, first by favoring their own products and channels over competing third parties, and second by forcing ad buyers to pay an undeserved 'rent' in the form of greater costs to buy ads to counteract the biased results and/or premium placement for big-tech's own offerings." Rayner offered a couple of screenshots that first show Google's current business practi