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Here's Amazon's sleaziest commercial practice: when you search Amazon, the top results for your search aren't the best matches for your queries; they're products sold by the companies willing to pay the most for search placement, in a "real-time auction" that runs every time you search.

The cost of winning that auction comes out of your pocket through higher prices: the first result for an Amazon query is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match. The top row is *25% more* expensive.

On average, the best match for your query is *17* positions down the screen, on the second page, where almost no one ever bothers to scroll: pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/s...

This rip-off is Amazon's *most* profitable line of business, more profitable than AWS or Prime. It makes the company more than *$80b/year*. And - incredibly - Expedia's found a way to make it even worse.

Like Amazon, Expedia auctions off its search results. They call this their "VIP listing" program.

Practically speaking, hotels *have* to pay for this, because it boosts booking rates by 42% (the first ten results on an Expedia search-results page get 62% of the clicks). VIP listing is expensive for the merchant - but it's even more expensive for you and me.

That's because Expedia requires hotels in its VIP listings programs to *raise their prices on non-Expedia sites by 10-25%...INDEFINITELY.*

Let me repeat that: to stay in business, hotels need to be on Expedia. To stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to raise their prices to pay Expedia's junk fees, but they have to raise their prices everywhere else.

But to *really* stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to use the VIP program, which is even *more* expensive. And - one more time - hotels in the VIP program have to jack up their prices *everywhere else, INDEFINITELY*.

This means that, throughout the economy, hotel prices are rising at a superinflationary rate, because Expedia - who command 80% of the market - are pushing those prices up.

This goes a long way to explaining why US hotel rates rose *58%* from a 2020 average of $103/night to a 2025 average of $162/night. It explains why hotel prices rose by 5% *last year*, which is *double* the rate of inflation.

And this is why Expedia stock is up 65% since the start of the Iran war, a fact that Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin attributes to "higher margins" from "higher prices": s202.q4cdn.com/757635260/fi...

In his coverage of the Expedia lawsuit - which brought many of these details to light - Hepner notes that hotels themselves have undergone near-total cartelization.

Hilton, Marriott, and Choice International own the majority of all hotels after a string of acquisitions that went largely unchallenged by slumbering antitrust regulators around the world.

These consolidated chains have *also* jacked up prices and enshittified their service, slashing housekeeping and check-in staff and allowing their facilities to slip into disrepair.

This, too, is characteristic of monopolization: whenever a monopoly takes over part of its supply chain, the rest of the supply chain consolidates to prevent itself from being ripped off by the new giant.

This is the story of publishers consolidating to defend themselves from Borders/B&N, Walmart and Costco, then Amazon; and it's the story of literary agencies consolidating to resist the power of those overgrown publishers.

And it's the story of health-care, which saw consolidation in pharmaceuticals leading to mergers among hospitals, who screwed the insurers, who also consolidated.

In every case, it's the workers and the people who rely on them that get the shitty end of the stick. Hotel guests, readers and patients pay more for inferior products.

Writers, editors, doctors, nurses, hotel staff and housekeepers get lower pay and worse working-conditions: pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/l...

The problem of intermediaries is that when intermediaries gain monopoly power - by buying their rivals and capturing buyers and sellers - they are able to squeeze both.

As Tim Wu says, this is the moment when a company that's supposed to be helping becomes a predator, acquires "main character syndrome" and makes every transaction all about the middleman, at the expense of the people buying and selling: pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/a...

There are so many reasons for inflation and the cost of living crisis: wage stagnation, wars of choice in Iran, environmental cataclysm after environmental cataclysm.