Tag: Expedia

Europe continues its anti-Google campaign

euroflagzThe European Commissioner in charge of antitrust matters is to meet up with the companies that complained about Google’s behaviour in Europe.

According to a report in Reuters, the new commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, wants to gather more information on the case.

To that end she is to meet companies with a beef – those include Microsoft, Hotmaps, Expedia, TripAdvisor and a gaggle of publishers.  They all believe that Google is abusing its dominance in the European sphere.

Late last month the European Parliament voted to break up Google – that vote however lacks teeth.

Vestager has teeth and has the ability to impose swingeing fines on Google if it’s shown it has antitrust tendencies.

Meanwhile, Reuters also reports that a German company is suing Google and Youtube for allegedly infrong a patent for video compression it own.

Algorithms gouge online buyers

smartphone-shoppingA study by a team of researchers at the Northeastern University have discovered that online shops target people based on their profiles and charge some more than others for the same products.

The team said that people regularly receive personalised content, such as specific offers from Amazon.  That, the study shows, can be to a person’s advantage but e-commerce sites manipulate search results and customise prices without anyone knowing.

The researchers looked at 16 popular e-commerce sites, including 10 general shops and six hotel and car rental sites,to measure price discrimination and price steering.

“We have found numerous instances of price steering and discrimination on a variety of top e-commerce site,” they said in a report.

Some sites altered prices by hundreds of dollars and travel sites showed inconsistencies in a higher percentage of cases.

They said Expedia and hotels,com “steered a subset of users towards more expensive hotels”.

The team said that price differences were significant in some of the cases. Amazon and Ebay were excluded from the study and so too were firms like Apple.

Although the researchers said they contacted the sites they surveyed, they did not say how or if the companies replied.