Do you enjoy my posts pointing and laughing at terrible attorneys?
Do you like news that is sourced from original legal filings?
Do you think the public should have not just the right, but the practical ability, to access public records?
Well, do I have an opportunity for you!
In the U.S. even though (most) federal court records are public documents, it costs money to actually access these documents - 10 cents a page!
This can add up fast when you are talking about legal filings. For example, if you followed along with my recent posts about Sir Clownshoes, his response to the Court's Show Cause order was 112 pages, including exhibits. The reason I was able to make those posts without paying the U.S. government $11 was because of a wonderful site called CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/). They have a browser extension that automatically adds court documents that the user purchases from PACER (the federal site that costs money) to their public site (https://free.law/recap). That way, only one person has to pay $11, instead of everyone single person who wants to point and laugh.
What does this have to do with you?
CourtListener recently launched a new project that allows users to indicate documents that they need/want access to, but cannot pay for themselves, their "Pray and Pay" Project (https://www.courtlistener.com/help/pray-and-pay/)
Anyone can register for a PACER account. (https://pacer.uscourts.gov/register-account/pacer-case-search-only) (You don't need to be an attorney, or even in the U.S.! You do need to give your name, DOB, address, and other contact information, however.) And every three months, you can download up to $30 worth of documents - that is, 300 pages, for free.
That means, you - yes you! - can register for a PACER account, download the RECAP extension, and then, four times a year, help provide researches, litigants, interested parties, and shitposters alike access to public records! All without having to pay a cent!
Alternatively, if you need or want access to a public court document, but don't have the funds/can't make a PACER account for some reason, you can request the document through CourtListener. (You do still need to register with CourtListener, but it requires far less information.)
As of the time of this post, there are 1,007 pending requests for documents. Just 17 people could fulfill all those requests, right now, for free.
(And I know I'm framing this in terms of my silly little posts, but having access to these cases and these documents is actually really, really important to a lot of people. You will absolutely make someone's day by fulfilling a request.)
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Jean Giraud (Moebius 1938–2012) “From Paris to Venice” Venise Celeste (1984) Source
Moebius: "I realize that my art is a reflection of my life, and not the reverse. For some artists, it's the contrary. Their life reflects their art. But I don't want to go that way, although it can be a big temptation. It was a conscious decision, and a big one for me, because in some ways, my life has become a reflection of my art.
"For example, the first time I came to the United States, I worked for Walt Disney Studios. I stayed in a big hotel, I was given a big car, I was very well treated. It was very nice. People loved me and I received many compliments that were a reflection of my art. But I couldn't live like that for long. It's dangerous to the soul. It's a threat to creativity and self-respect."
College football's latest existential crisis, summarized:
Medium-term background: Over the last ten and especially last five years, college football has gone from the fiefdoms of stuffy provincial old farts so devoted to the mirage of amateurism that programs could get in trouble for putting cream cheese on bagels, to a free-for-all wild west where players go shopping for new teams every season and whoever has the biggest firehose of money wins. This is in large part because the athletes being unpaid in the first place was never legally sustainable and only lasted so long out of inertia and coordination issues. If you're pro-labor it's a good and necessary thing overall, but for smaller programs, their fans, and anyone with a bit of romance about the game, it's been a disaster. On a related note, sports gambling has gone from something only legal in a handful of US cities to infinitely accessible to anyone with a smartphone over the same five years. Some would say these are both part of the same trend, namely very rich people getting to do anything they want because no one gives a shit about rules or ethics anymore, but that's neither here nor there.
Short-term background: A year or two ago, Texas oil billionaire Cody Campbell basically bought the Texas Tech athletic program. Tech has historically been a B-to-C-tier team with a massive chip on its shoulder thanks to never being able to get past the A-tier schools. Campbell is now chairman of the board of regents, i.e. the boss' boss' boss of most of the other people in this story. This past offseason he paid $5 million to recruit a quarterback named Brendan Sorsby, previously with Indiana and Cincinnati.
Last few weeks: Sorsby is outed as having a massive gambling addiction, from the stereotypical "up 'til 3 AM betting on Malaysian soccer" stuff to betting individual balls and strikes in baseball games to (brace yourself) betting on his own teams to lose or underperform. For example, to paraphrase a redditor's take, 'he saw his teammate struggling and instead of wanting to help him get better, he put a hundred bucks on the guy to get Under 2.5 Catches next game'.
From most of the Chicago White Sox in 1919 to Pete Rose in 1989, any professional athlete who has done anything remotely like this has been banned for life from their sport and made persona non grata. But again, college sports is a lawless wasteland right now and Cody Campbell didn't get rich by taking losses on his investments, no sir. He paid for Sorsby and Sorsby's gonna play. After the NCAA (college sports' governing body, a shambling rotten corpse of its former cream-cheese-outlawing self) seemed to have finally found a rule they could enforce without a labor-law suit bitchslapping them, banning Sorsby, Campbell more or less went judge-shopping until he found a retired judge willing to issue an injunction allowing Sorsby to play.
To be clear, Campbell and his puppets (head coach, athletic director, university president; their collective inability to shut the fuck up throughout this has led people to suspect that Campbell basically ordered them to go all-offense in PR.) aren't disputing that Sorsby is a gambling addict who bet on his own team to lose. They're saying that it would be discrimination against the mentally ill to not allow him to play. The words the judge used were 'irreparable harm'. Analogies spread on reddit over the last few weeks have included "holding AA meetings in a bar", "letting a drunk driver go scot-free because alcoholism is a disease", and "a banker caught stealing from customer funds getting a promotion".
The entire college football world, which had spent the last five years tearing itself apart over TV money and private equity, immediately united against Campbell and Tech. Several colleges wiped any games with Tech in any sport from their schedule, their conference intimated that they can and would expel them by member vote, the attorneys general of Oklahoma, Utah, and Kansas all promised to take action. And to be clear this was a truly existential, all hands on deck crisis: if the athletes are taking dives for money, then there is no sport. It's a bunch of mercenary hustlers dressing up like football players to pretend to play football. Even the vampiric sportsbooks themselves don't want this: nobody bets on fixed matches.
Bear in mind also it's not out of the question that Sorsby could be arrested for this: he was under 21 for much of this and sent money across state lines for family and friends to gamble with. So Campbell got his own lawyer: Ken Paxton, Texas state AG and current senate candidate. While Reddit hates every Texas Republican politician, the Texan posters do seem to regard Paxton as uniquely stupid and incompetent. He was impeached three years ago, which, how do you manage to do that as a Republican AG in Texas?
Anyway, this is where my law-fu gets a little weak, but apparently Paxton's filing on Tech and Campbell's behalf was so incompetently written, so wildly aggressive without any authority to actually see it through, that it opened up his clients to legal vulnerabilities that wouldn't have existed otherwise and sets the prosecution up for a thorough beatdown. So, late last night, Tech dumps mutually parts with Sorsby, rumored to have kept around half of his $5 million payday for barely avoiding becoming the Shoeless Joe Jackson of football. Campbell gets told "no" for the first time in years and loses millions of dollars for nothing. Paxton was (admittedly they say this every time) apparently in a tight race with Democrat James Talarico, and now he very publicly has argued that the 5th-most-popular college team in his own state should let their quarterback fix games for gambling rings because his billionaire sugar daddy threw a tantrum over it. May end up mattering, may not.
Everything in the world has been like this for the last six years.
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The first book in Edgar-nominated Anne Holt’s internationally bestselling mystery series featuring detective Hanne Wilhelmsen.
Asmall-time drug dealer is found battered to death on the outskirts of the Norwegian capital, Oslo. A young Dutchman, walking aimlessly in central Oslo covered in blood, is taken into custody but refuses to talk. When he is informed that the woman who discovered the body, Karen Borg, is a lawyer, he demands her as his defender, although her specialty is civil, not criminal, law.
A couple of days later another lawyer is found shot to death. Soon police officers Håkon Sand and Hanne Wilhelmsen establish a link between the two killings. They also find a coded message hidden in the murdered lawyer’s apartment. Their maverick colleague in the drugs squad, Billy T., reports that a recent rumor in the drug underworld involves drug-dealing lawyers. Now the reason why the young Dutchman insisted on having Karen Borg as a defender slowly dawns on them: since she was the one to find and report the body, she is the only Oslo lawyer that cannot be implicated in the crime.
As the officers investigate, they uncover a massive network of corruption leading to the highest levels of government. As their lives are threatened, Hanne and her colleagues must find the killer and, in the process, bring the lies and deception out into the open.
The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
https://archive.is/VTrj9
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.
Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:
As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz
Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."
Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).
As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:
The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.
In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":
Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.
(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)
This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.
Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.
Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:
Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:
Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (allege) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations either as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix
Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.
As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.
(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)
When Mortimer was writing his Rumpole of the Bailey stories, Equity Court didn't even have one computer. I wonder what he, or Horace Rumpole, would think of these times.
As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.
It seems like someone who didn't want the service to exist in the first place could pretty much just stop it by claiming to fight fraud. In fact, it sounds a lot like what the current administration has been doing (if much less subtly).
kind of beside the point but I have never seen this put so succinctly:
Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response.
among other things, this perfectly encapsulates how kiwifarmers relentlessly harass trans women (and often their allies) off of this website; Patricia Taxxon is a particularly notable example.
I hadn't read a lot of scifi until after I read The Murderbot Diaries (which kind of introduced me to the contemporary scifi lit scene), but I'm currently rereading what was my favorite scifi book before I read Murderbot, and it's still in my top 10. It's a standalone novel that came out in 1988 called Hellspark, written by Janet Kagan. Martha Wells has said in one or two places that Janet Kagan is one of her scifi inspirations (and has mentioned one of Kagan's other novels, Mirabile, specifically), but I wouldn't be surprised if Wells drew some inspiration from Hellspark as well, because I was reminded of it when I read certain parts of TMBD.
Hellspark features a main character named Tocohl who is confident, pragmatic, and within the first few pages of Chapter 1 uses her fighting skills and responsive armor suit skin to take down a group of bad guys armed with knives who are kidnapping a woman who turns out to be an important character in the story. Tocohl is assisted by her extrapolative computer Maggie, who lives in Tocohl's ship but uses a remote to interact with characters on planet part of the time. Tocohl usually speaks to Maggie by subvocalizing—this book was where I first heard that term, though I didn't quite understand what it meant until I read TMBD.
The main story takes place on a planet where a survey team has gone to assess if one of the life forms there, the sprookjes, are sapient, because that will determine whether the planet can be developed by outside forces or not. But there's been a mysterious death, the planet is prone to frequent lightning storms, and the survey team are all humans from different planets, leading to cultural and language differences that add to the tension. Tocohl, however, is from a culture of traveling merchants, and she uses her understanding of the languages and the nonverbal movements of the different cultures to work through the group's communication challenges as she helps them try to determine if the sprookjes are sapient before their time runs out.
I absolutely love the cultural worldbuilding behind each of the fictional human cultures that is evident from page 1. The way Janet Kagan emphasizes the body language and movements of each culture isn't quite like anything else I've ever read outside of the class I once took on intercultural communication. If you're looking for a scifi story with a bit of mystery, intercultural dynamics, and analysis of the timeless question "how do you define, much less determine, sapience?," I'm fairly confident you will not regret picking up this book. :)
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When a student copies an essay online instead of writing it and then painstakingly changes every word to a synonym until the text no longer makes any sense...
This is the fifth anniversary of me receiving the paper that contained "Unused York City." With ChatGPT slop invading my classes like original thought-choking kudzu, I now look back on the copy-paste + Spinbot days with a surprising amount of rosy nostalgia.
I was once in the office and another professor called me over. She was teaching a course on global citizenship.
"I can't figure out what this student is writing about," she said. "She keeps using the phrase 'perspiration stores.' Perspiration stores this, perspiration stores that."
I glanced at the paper and read a paragraph.
"Friend," I said. "She's writing about sweatshops."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's de facto boss is an absentee landlord.
Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist – is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine:
Google likes to position itself as a wise steward of the internet. They say they use their vast troves of data about the internet and its users to connect the right person with the right information at the right moment. As their mission statement has it, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
The tacit argument is, "Sure, we repeatedly violated antitrust law in order to monopolize the internet, but the internet needs a monopolist. It's scary out there! We have amassed power so that we can protect and guide you."
It's a bullshit argument and no one should accept it – but even if you think it's worth harnessing monopoly power to promote a wise king to rule over the internet, you'd still want Google to take that responsibility seriously. If we're to have a landlord for our civilization's digital nervous system, let's not have it be an absentee landlord.
Google is an absentee landlord. In 2019, they chose to deliberately worsen search results in order to make you search repeatedly to find the information you're seeking, because every fresh query lets them serve fresh advertisements:
Not all of Google's enshittification can be attributed to deliberate sabotage. Much of it is the result of neglect. Ask Google for a product review and they'll pass over the most rigorous, honest websites on the internet in favor of affiliate scammers who repackage Amazon best-of lists to peddle overpriced, underperforming junk that's sometimes so bad it's dangerous:
And of course, Google AI search results present the company with a highly refined and confident-sounding way to launder spam into product recommendations:
Could Google do better? Provably so. Kagi, a small company that runs a search engine powered by Google's own search index consistently delivers results that are substantially superior to Google's – using Google's own infrastructure:
If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.
They just choose not to.
They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.
Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:
It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.
Google has become a scammer's paradise.
Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:
(This was an especially devastating attack because the airlines themselves hide their customer service phone numbers – as enshittified monopolists, they want your money, not your complaints – so it's normal to search Google for the number you're seeking, rather than scouring the airlines' deliberately confusing customer service sites.)
This is especially galling because Google has an extensive "verified merchant" program that goes to enormous lengths to establish the true identity of every merchant whose businesses are listed on Google, in maps, ads and search results. Google "knows" which URLs belong to the airlines. If it can be tricked into scraping a different website for the airlines' phone numbers, that's because Google couldn't be bothered to connect its own database of canonical airline URLs to the process that serves phone numbers to the 90% of the web-using public who search with Google.
Google's database of the canonical URLs for businesses doesn't stop at airlines or even large businesses. Nearly every local merchant has undergone Google's verification process, which includes a step where Google physically mails a postcard with a unique number to the merchant's registered address, which the merchant must then key into Google to prove that they're located where they say they are.
Despite this, Google's ad-sales system will happily sell anyone the right to advertise a different website for queries for specific merchants, and those ads appear above the real result for the business's website. To make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it.
This is a gift to fraudsters. I had my own run-in with it in 2023, when I was tricked by a Google ad into ordering dinner from my local Thai place using a scam site that had cloned the restaurant's menu. The scammers marked up the price by 15%, then passed the order on to the restaurant, pocketing the vig:
This scammer – based out of a UC Berkeley dorm-room – had copied hundreds of restaurant websites, then bought Google ads for the restaurants' names, ensuring that searchers would see the scam result before the real one. Remember: Google knows what the true URL is for every one of those restaurants but it sold the scammer ads for a different URL that appeared when people searched for the restaurant by name.
Google could trivially add a step to the ad sales pipeline that detects mismatches between a merchant's known URL and the URL in an ad bought against the merchant's name. It could automatically resolve these mismatches by sending an email to the merchant's verified email address that says, "Hey, are you buying an ad with a new URL? If so, just reply to this email."
I don't know why Google doesn't do this. Maybe they make huge sums from these scam ads and they don't want to forego the revenue. Or maybe they just don't care.
Whichever it is, there's real consequences for this negligence by the internet's absentee landlord. Take abortions: fake abortion clinics – where pregnant women are bullied or tricked out of the abortions they're seeking – buy Google ads against the names of real abortion clinics. Google makes millions sending abortion-seekers to fake abortion providers:
Google started off as the ideal "intermediary" – the fancy economist's term for a "middleman." They took as their duty to figure out the best websites for you to look at based on your interests, serving as an honest broker between internet users and internet publishers. In the quarter-century since the company's founding, as it transformed itself into a monopolist, it developed the curse of every intermediary: it got Main Character Syndrome.
This is Tim Wu's formulation: the reason for an intermediary existence is to serve the parties to the transaction. Ebay says it exists to connect buyers and sellers, Uber is supposed to connect drivers and riders, dating sites are supposed to connect people with their love-matches. But intermediaries are cursed with an enviable position: by dint of sitting between these different groups of people, the intermediary learns everything about both sides of the transaction, while each side only knows about its own position.
Amazon knows the price you're willing to pay, it knows who's set the lowest price, and it knows how many identical items that match your query are for sale. But the sellers don't know any of that, and you only know some of it. By capitalizing on that information (rather than using it to efficiently match buyers and sellers), Amazon can match you with the sellers willing to pay the highest junk fees, rather than the ones who offer the best price for the best goods:
This is Wu's Main Character Syndrome in action. Once Amazon attains a dominant market share, it can maximize its own welfare at the expense of its buyers and sellers, transforming itself from a helper to a parasite:
Google says it wants to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but every dime it spends fighting fraud (a critical part of this mission!) is a dime it can't spend on stock buybacks, executive compensation and AI servers. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is the mission of a good intermediary; "do the absolute minimum to fight fraud" is the mission of a formerly good intermediary with terminal Main Character Syndrome.
Google keeps finding ways to expose its users to fraud while lining its own pockets. That restaurant markup scam that caught me in 2023? Three years later, it's way worse.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu just filed suit against GuestReservations.com, BookOnline.com and Booking Holdings for running a massive version of the restaurant menu scam – one that extracted millions from people booking hotel rooms:
Here's how the scam worked: these companies put up websites with deceptive URLs, like SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com, and then bought the associated Google ad-word ("San Francisco Marriott"). At the top of Google searches for "San Francisco Marriott booking" was the ad for SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com. This site would sell you a room at the Marriott, at a markup of 35% to 85%.
This is a pure ripoff. If Google had served the correct result at the top of the page – if it had used its own database of confirmed merchants and their associate websites to validate its ads – then people booking hotels would have saved 35% to 85% on their rooms.
City Attorney Chiu says that the perps here registered domains for all kinds of hotels, even tiny ones in small towns, all over America. That means that it's not just visitors to San Francisco who got screwed by these creeps – it's also San Franciscans who booked hotel rooms around the country.
Google bears the lion's share of the blame here, but Visa and the other credit card companies are critical to these scams. Card companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers.
I discovered this for myself when I was tricked into buying theater tickets from a ripoff site that had registered the URL of the show I wanted to go to. I figured out that I'd been rooked within a minute of clicking the buy button, but it took months and multiple appeals – and ultimately a threat to cancel my credit card – to get Visa to refund me.
Visa – another bloated monopolist with terminal Main Character Syndrome – can see that it has merchants who generate zillions of appeals and charge-backs because they run scam businesses like these. They could treat these merchants as the fraudsters they are, but because the crooks wreathe themselves in gauzy excuses and lengthy terms of service, Visa enables these massive, nationwide cons.
Google, Visa and the other monopolists who serve as de facto regulators for our society have arrogated to themselves the power to observe every transaction and block the obvious scams. We pay for their failure to take minimal, obvious steps to protect us from the scammers who thrive on their platforms.
Why should they? They're the main characters. They're Bizarro-world spidermen, whose great power confers no responsibility.
Too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to care, and shielding themselves with T&Cs that threaten going DMCA Section 1201 or some similar nonsense on anyone trying to fix their shit, because they successfully captured a large enough part of the market through regulations onerous for anyone smaller. Where did I hear that before?
Oh yes. Here. And they were building their monopoly in every field for decades. With disastrous results.
I don't know what's worse: doing this on purpose or just letting it happen through typical corporate behavior like inertia and design-by-committee.
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The Kitchen Entity came crawling out of the oven vent, and now it just hovers here in the middle of the room, like some kind of domesticated jellyfish. When you turn on the microwave, it crackles like a geiger counter. On warm days, it smells like mom's special m&m pancakes.
