#146: Robot Scalpers and the BOTS Act

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2016

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Have you ever tried buying a ticket online to a popular event? Maybe you got up early or stayed up late so you could grab a ticket right as they went on sale, only to find out they sold out almost instantly? Of course you could probably get one on StubHub or from another scalper, but that can be expensive. Who is to blame for this travesty? According to your elected officials, it’s the robots. That’s why Congress recently passed the BOTS Act, which would ban robotic scalpers in hopes of lowering ticket prices. It sounds good, in theory, but will it actually work? What are the unintended consequences? Joining Evan to discuss this is Anne Hobson, Technology Policy Fellow at the R Street Institute. For more, you can read her her op-ed here.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwargerber. On today's show, Tickets Scalping and Robots. What are those two things have to do with each other? Well, you might have had this happen to you at a point in your life. You're trying to get tickets to Taylor Swift or maybe it's a big
0:22.1	sports match and NFL game and you stay up all night or you get up early to try to buy tickets
0:29.0	right when they go on sale. You know, you're you're staking out the website and you sign on
0:34.0	only to find that they've been sold out almost instantly, and you never had a chance.
0:37.9	And now your only options are to buy them on the secondary market for above face value.
0:42.4	Now, you might be frustrated by this, and it seems that some in Congress share your frustration.
0:46.4	But is the solution worse than the problem, or is this a solution in search of a problem?
0:50.3	Well, joining me to discuss this is Anne Hobson, Tech Policy Fellow at the R Street Institute.
0:54.4	And thanks for joining the show.
0:55.7	Thank you very much.
0:56.8	So this bill, the BOTS Act, it stands for Better Online Ticket Sales Act.
1:01.9	Now, of course, we've seen that legislation that has a nice name doesn't always have a nice outcome.
1:07.7	People who are skeptical of government surveillance will always point to the Patriot Act
1:11.7	as a law that might not have been so patriotic after all. But let's give this bill a fair hearing
1:18.0	and let's discuss it. So, Ann, do you agree that it's a problem that people try to sign on,
1:23.8	but all these robots are buying the tickets? I mean, is this something that the government should be dealing with? What do you think of this bill? So I think bots are only an issue for some
1:32.8	concerts. A Ticketmaster regularly rolls out a stat that bots buy more than 60% of the most desirable
1:40.2	tickets for some shows, but there are some aspects of that that need to be looked at further.
1:45.4	First of all, it's most desirable tickets, and it's only some shows.
1:49.5	An analysis of a Justin Bieber concert showed that after pre-sales, there was only 8% of the tickets left.
1:57.8	And so if bots even took 60% of that, overall, they'd be taking 4% of the total tickets
2:03.2	originally available for that show. So the bots weren't the reason that there was restricted
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TechFreedom, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TechFreedom and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.