The end of GDS as we know it?

I just read an interesting post over at the Travolution blog. Basically, it says that the major flight and hotel companies are worried about screen scraping (like some meta-search engines use) as opposed to paid for API and GDS methods. 

Does anyone else think that paid for access to flight and hotel availability is ridiculously old fashioned? To me, its like Google charging visitors to use their web search! Surely the point of distribution is to distribute your product to as many people who might want to buy it as possible? Why charge? Oh yes “offering the availability search functionality incurs a significant infrastructure cost”. Rubbish. These days servers are cheap, its just a question of achieving the right economy of scale.  

There must be one GDS company out there with the nerve to open up and offer free access? Watch out, if you don’t Google will do it and blow you out of the water!