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Comment by AlyssaRowan | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Hiring someone specifically to try to do an aggressive, audit hatchet-job on special, star customers that had spent six figures on golden tickets with them doesn't make this story read very sympathetically for American Airlines to me.

Perhaps it's naïveté on my part, expecting a business to have some care for its reputation as well as its bottom line, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to promise an elephant, you'd better at least have a pachyderm on backorder and not try to wriggle out of it the moment it inconveniences you, because that just makes you look callous.

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I can't help but feel that "they broke the rules!" is a hollow argument in a case like this. Most obviously, because it's not clear they did - Vroom's contract didn't prohibit ticket sales, but that was still the grounds for revocation.

More broadly, though, the issue of selective enforcement is a thorny one. If you write a contract sufficiently byzantine and ambiguous, any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behavior. At that point you have a totally broken agreement - you preserve it for anyone whose behavior you like, and revoke it for anyone who crosses you.

It's like the issue of selective policing. We live in a world where "don't commit any rules" isn't a viable answer, because there are endless lists of ambiguously defined rules on everyday tasks like accessing a computer. So if someone decides they truly want to pursue you, they can dig up a website where you mis-entered your birthday, declare it fraudulent misrepresentation, and try to put you in prison.

If everyone is guilty, the only question is how you decide what to pursue. And in this case, it's painfully clear that American didn't pursue egregious violations or frequent offenders, they went after anyone who had taken advantage of a product they regretted selling.

> any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behavior. At that point you have a totally broken agreement - you preserve it for anyone whose behavior you like, and revoke it for anyone who crosses you.

That sounds like a totally fantastic agreement, at least from the issuer's point of view and ignoring potential PR problems.

Yep, and I think that's what's being done. The article makes it pretty clear that the anti-fraud team had total freedom to reinterpret the contract until they got a success.

It's hideous, and as someone else pointed out illegal if you can make the claim stick (ambiguity is meant to favor whoever didn't write the contract), but still a great business move.

> If you write a contract sufficiently byzantine and ambiguous, any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behaviour.

contra proferentem applies in common law, ambiguity benefits the party that did not write the contract

otherwise there's no reason to ever write a clear contract

I think this is why inter-company contracts tend to be clearer and often simpler than company-employee contracts.

Your average EULA is impossible to follow or even understand because the company has so much more recourse to the law than the customer - as we see here, with American violating its own contracts and trusting their legal weight to make good. The law very sensibly attempts to punish willful lack of clarity, but (as with patent trolling, and asset forfeiture) it only holds when everyone can fight a legal case.

A complementary analysis:

A company-company contract is actually a much simpler, self-defined, and symmetric relationship. Whereas an employer-employee contract must take into account the huge lump of complexity that is employment law. The company doesn't really like employment law, so they make every attempt to nullify it, paralleling its complexity.

EULA drafters are similarly trying to create a whole new body of law, bootstrapping it using copyright while eroding any consumer rights granted by copyright. Companies would prefer a much simpler EULA that said "we can revoke your license at any time for no reason, with no refund". But such a thing would be rejected by courts. So they attempt to construct such a policy by following the contour of the law (ie what courts won't reject) as close as possible.

Regarding the original post, I think American was really just doing the standard corporate stonewalling (I'm not endorsing this as being morally right). It seems as if the pass holders would have eventually prevailed in court, but what actually settled the question was American's filing of bankruptcy - which made the whole thing moot.

>If you write a contract sufficiently byzantine and ambiguous, any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behavior. At that point you have a totally broken agreement - you preserve it for anyone whose behavior you like, and revoke it for anyone who crosses you.

I remember reading that this is huge part of how the Russian government does corruption. The rules to operate a business are very complicated and expensive to follow, but you can get unofficial permission to flout them.

Anyone who has flown American lately won't be surprised by this type of behavior out of them.

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