The proposed de-regulation of the GDSs in Europe was never going to be easy. In America they could be freed of their various restrictions without too much fuss because no airline had any stake in them.
But in Europe three major airlines have a substantial stake in a major GDS. So any de-regulation had to take account of this and ideally provide safeguards against abuse by the carriers, Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia or the GDS Amadeus.
The EC's Directorate of Transport and Energy (DG TREN) has so far held two public consultations on de-regulation - the second earlier this year - and commissioned consultants to report on the subject.
The subsequent Brattle Report (published in 2003) seemed to provide the right blue print for any de-regulation: while general de-regulation was needed, there must be safeguards - the principle of mandatory participation - as long as an airline had a stake in a GDS.
These safeguards would require such airlines to put their inventory on other GDSs and require the said GDS to accept the inventory of airlines which were not its owners.
This was especially needed in areas of double dominance i.e. where both the airline and the GDS were dominant, for example France where Air France is the dominant airline and Amadeus the dominant GDS.
This all made common sense and was generally supported by buyers and suppliers.
But this consensus now seems to be under threat from the EC lawyers who are mulling over the definition of "parent carrier."
This basically turns on whether an airline directly or indirectly owns or effectively controls a systems vendor (in this case a GDS). Do Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia, which together hold a 46.4% stake in Amadeus, control that GDS?
That they should be discussing this so late in the day and without any public debate has severely angered the travel industry. For most, there was never any doubt that the three carreirs were parent owners - after all they did found Amadeus.
But the industry senses it is about to be stitched up by the DG TREN which will rule that Amadeus has no parent carriers and that de-regulation can therefore proceed without any safeguards - that Amadeus and the three airlines can exploit their positions of dominance.
(It should be stressed here that Amadeus has always said it would never do this).
One organisation, understandably off the record, told BTE: "Amadeus is claiming that there are apparently no parent carriers in Europe. However, until very recently the GDS and its airline owners have argued that the parent carrier and mandatory participation provisions impose unfair costs on the Amadeus owners.
"It is impossible to square this long-standing complaint by Amadeus with its present contention that the parent carrier provisions do not apply to Amadeus' airline owners at all.
"There should be no mistake about the grave implications if, under cover of interpreting the definition of parent carrier, the Commission were to rewrite the Code.
"Doing so would literally unleash Amadeus and its three owning airlines to bludgeon travellers, agents and airlines with the very sort of anti-competitive practices that the Code was meant to bring to a well-deserved end.
"There would be far-reaching implications for the European airline industry if the argument now being made by Amadeus that is has no “parent carrier” under the Code of Conduct were accepted by the EU.
"If so, there would be nothing in the Code today that would stop Air France, Iberia or Lufthansa from mining the Amadeus CRS to access confidential information concerning the reservations of passengers booking on other airlines."
This is strong stuff - but not an isolated view. There is both great concern and genuine anger at what the EC seems set to do.
Why it should move from a position of general consensus to one which pitches most of the travel industry against it is hard to fathom. It seems an utterly foolish road to take. It is not too late to turn back.