(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Stop Corporate Collusion, Not Pro-Consumer Tech [1] ['Chloris Creator', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Thom Hartmann'] Date: 2026-09-21 Progressives have good reason to be suspicious when a corporation promises that new technology will make our lives better. Often it’s a naked attempt to increase profits. But reflexive opposition to technology does no good either, and that’s where the conversation about algorithmic pricing is headed. Algorithmic pricing is just software that adjusts prices based on things like demand, inventory, and timing. There are valid concerns about algorithmic pricing. Nobody wants a company mining their browsing history and learning they’re desperate enough to pay $20 for something everyone else gets for $10. But it’s worth remembering what pricing algorithms mostly do: they automate a decision businesses have always made by hand — cut prices when demand is weak, raise them when it’s strong — and they do it faster and more precisely than a person with a clipboard ever could. Take an airline seat. Once a plane pushes back from the gate, an empty seat is worth exactly nothing. So airlines have every reason to keep adjusting the price right up until departure, dropping it if bookings are soft, in hopes of filling the seat with somebody. A hotel room works the same way — you can’t sell tonight’s vacancy tomorrow, so hotels discount when demand is thin, and a price-conscious traveler ends up getting a deal that a rigid, one-price-fits-all system would never have offered. Concert tickets, ballgame seats, theater tickets — same logic. There’s real value in technology that notices weak demand early and drops the price rather than letting the seat go unsold. Then there’s food. Grocery stores throw away enormous amounts of perishable inventory every week while families stare down high grocery bills. Software that flags a product nearing the end of its shelf life and marks it down automatically — rather than waiting for an employee to walk the aisles with a sticker gun — is good for the store, good for the shopper, and good for anyone who’d rather see food sold than dumped in a landfill. This is why it doesn’t make sense to treat every computer-generated price change as inherently predatory. Often those price changes are pro-consumer. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has acknowledged that businesses can legitimately use dynamic pricing tied to demand and inventory, while separately investigating what’s sometimes called “surveillance pricing” — using detailed personal data to figure out the maximum an individual shopper will tolerate. These are not the same thing, and treating them as identical does nobody any favors. A grocery store system that flags “we have too many strawberries going bad today, drop the price” is just supply and demand moving at computer speed. A system that instead concludes “this particular customer buys strawberries every week and probably won’t notice a higher price” is doing something else entirely. Progressives can support the first without giving the second a pass. There’s no contradiction there. There’s another reason to be wary of a blanket ban on algorithmic pricing, and it’s one progressives ought to find persuasive: the technology doesn’t only serve giant corporations. Walmart and Delta and Marriott already have armies of analysts poring over pricing data — they don’t need an algorithm to compete with anyone. It’s the corner grocery store and the 12-room motel that stand to gain the most. This software gives them the analytical muscle already available to the big guys. A ban on pricing software doesn’t hurt Walmart. It hurts the business trying to compete with Walmart. None of this is to say that algorithms deserve a free pass. Collusion is still collusion, whether it happens over a handshake or through software quietly syncing prices across competitors, and antitrust law should treat it that way. Deceiving customers about what they’re paying is still fraud, algorithm or no. And using someone’s personal data to squeeze out the highest price they’ll bear calls for real privacy and disclosure rules. But regulating specific harmful behavior is very different from banning the technology that makes pricing decisions in the first place — and such a ban wouldn’t make the pricing decision go away. Somebody still has to set the price of the plane ticket, the hotel room, the carton of strawberries. Maybe it’s a spreadsheet. Maybe it’s last year’s numbers pulled off a shelf. Maybe it’s a manager eyeballing the shelf and guessing. None of those is more virtuous just because a human happened to do the arithmetic. A better test: does the technology help a business with too much inventory find someone willing to buy it at a lower price? Does it let a small operation compete with a much bigger one? Does it cut down on waste? Does it force sellers to react when customers stop paying what they charged last week? When the answer is yes, there’s little reason for progressives to be afraid of it. Regulate the real harms but leave the calculator alone. The point shouldn’t be to stop computers from doing arithmetic. It should be to make sure that businesses are setting their prices honestly and not violating consumer protection laws. 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