United States v. Google Inc. and ITA Software, Inc. | Hacker News Reader

United States v. Google Inc. and ITA Software, Inc.

justice.gov

17 pointswoodall8 comments

Fascinating. If you read the stipulation, you find out that these legal notices can now be served (itself a legal concept) via email to the principal parties.

I thought the justice dept approved it with conditions? See, for example http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gxkMxcbM-...

Edit: I see now that this is just the actual conditions. Not as interesting as I thought it was going to be

I believe the way they enforce those conditions is to file a lawsuit to block the merger as it was (without conditions), then also file a proposed settlement that's agreed to by both the Justice dept and Google/ITA, that contains the conditions.

I suppose it's possible for the court to reject the settlement, but it seems incredibly unlikely.

>I believe the way they enforce those conditions is to file a lawsuit

Yes, that's what happened.

>I suppose it's possible for the court to reject the settlement

I know I've heard of it happening.

tl;dr -- can someone summarize it?

The Justice Department is suing Google and ITA to block the merger by requesting that the court determine that it violates the Clayton Act.

The claim is that ITA's QPX product is the most advanced and successful of all the available P&S systems (airfare pricing and shopping systems). There are 4 other competitors, including Expedia (which doesn't license their software).

QPX is used by competitors to Google, such as Microsoft.

If Google were to acquire ITA, Google would have an incentive to block access to QPX from competitors, and thus exercise an unfair advantage over the competition.

If Google were to acquire ITA, Google would have an incentive to block access to QPX from competitors, and thus exercise an unfair advantage over the competition.

So anti-trust cases can be filed for even potentially monopolistic behaviour? Seems a little like pre-crime to me. Or does "prevention is better than cure" come up trumps here?

IN a way you're right. I assume it's because once a monopoly exists or once antitrust practices occur, the damage is irreversible. A company wiped out because of some other company's illegal actions can never return to its "former glory".

Also, it's a "reasonable probability" that the illegal actions would occur and that's enough in this context.

That's my guess anyway.

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