Expedience

Expedia takes over Wotif and a short time later Wotif and their major competitor, who together control 85% of the Australian online hotel booking market, raise their commissions to 15%.

No collusion or price signaling, honest guv.

Jim Clark talked of this back in the first dot.com era. He called it the “big new asshole in the middle” phenomenon.

First, internet based services disintermediate old school services by offering lower prices and easier access.

Then they get aggregated into one or two trans-national players, who can then exploit everyone to their heart’s content.

The anti-monopoly groups of smaller countries like Australia are virtually powerless against these ghost-like tax-free global virtual service providers.

In this I would suggest that there is a very nice market opportunity.
A web app cloning service where the pissed off customers (the hotels in the case of Expedia) can collectively commission a clone of, say, an Expedia, and then all switch to the clone at the same time, thereby offering no individual disadvantage. The end customers booking the hotel rooms, initially confused, would catch on after a single Google search.

IP concerns? Not a one. In the US software patents are now nearly worthless. In Australia patent enforcement is a joke, resulting in a situation where infringement is hardly considered a cost of business

Let’s call it capitalsocialism.com. This cloning service could take 1% of revenues for very little work.