Your articles names booking.com as one of several similar companies investigated and warned, but do not reveal which of those companies they were accusing of wrong doing:

"Not all of the six companies had fallen foul of all four of these bad practices, the CMA said."

But fair enough, those "X people are looking at this room" are not admirable and if regulators say they have to go that's fine. My experience from the back-end is that booking.com do not lie about how many rooms are left or how many people have recently booked.

Some companies (not people) work around their contract with booking, it is true. The question is why they demand to be on booking then? They didn't build the customer base, they didn't build the trust. They are free to sell on their own if they want, it is their job to be as little dependent on third parties as they can.

> But a big part of the allure of Booking and similar middlemen is the independent reviews, their guarantees, support, loyalty program and payment options.

Customers can read the independent reviews, check availability and price without making a purchase. So if booking.com is forced to let any hotel offer cheaper rates outside, then every hotel will do it. Those independent reviews will start getting stale and booking.com will be destroyed or reduced to irrelevance. I couldn't be happier if that happens, since they are my competitors, but it's not exactly unfair.

> Enforcing pricing is anti-competitive and anti-consumer.

You can not let third parties compete with yourself on your own platform, think about it. Should independent sellers be allowed to set up their stalls inside of a supermarket? Should I be allowed to set up a booth and sell drinks to people inside someone else's bar? You might as well say that it's anti-consumer to allow hotels to sell their rooms more expensive on third party platforms, because that's what it is.

> I find it very American to not know what Soviet means or implies.

Soviet in this sense is that you have somebody you need to get rid off or punish, so you invent a crime. Like you wrote, so I won't have to go into that more.

> It's also very American to try to preserve the rights of big corporations to fuck consumers.

These third parties do a lot to protect consumers. If the EU was doing the same thing that booking.com does, then I believe hackers would sing their praise high in the sky. Now that it is a company, they're the devil instead.

Those hotels that have made themselves dependent on booking.com were dependent on other dominating third parties in their region before that. And those guys were not nice to deal with at all. They would abuse accommodation providers in a way that would make the worst jerk working at booking.com management blush. For small hosts, booking.com was a relief from that. Before that, dominant third party sellers would demand room allocation and only pay for what they used. Think how utterly nuts that is.

I stand by my opinion that regulations should be the same for all actors and have the purpose of combatting abusive practices – no matter who is doing it. Not to designate a company to be the enemy of the state and start biting their heels. If the EU regulators wants something to busy themselves with, they can legislate mandatory free cancellation times. This would be a huge benefit to consumers and would not hurt honest industry actors.

Big companies are generally bastards, but in the case of booking.com, I think they are walking a reasonable line. Especially since there are so many other ways hotels can reach their customers. Such as with their own digital presence, through Google Maps, through AirBnB, through any of the other million third parties. It is very easy for customers to avoid booking.com if the like.