California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

Not if you're using X branding to market the pizza to Y.

Especially, not if the pizza being resold doesn't live up to X quality standards because it got cold.

Try reselling from any major fast food restaurant, they'll stop selling to you, and if you paid different people to do the pickup, I bet you would get sued.

But I bet I can’t start a taxi service and call it Uber Shuttle Service for job applicants and build a website with Uber logo, phone number, and everything and when job applicants call me I pretend to be Uber?

Hey why stop there? maybe I can ask the job applicants for their personal information letting them believe they are talking to Uber and if they look like good candidates, I can build a website with information I gathered from them and start my own employment agency, call it quadruple bites or something and then call FAANG companies and offer to place candidates...

I think a big part of the problem is the misrepresentation/false advertising.

However, the goal I think is more sinister. For example, I believe Walmart decides how much it wants to pay suppliers who want to have their stuff sold at Walmart. If a delivery app is big enough, it can dictate the prices and terms of sale with a restaurant and demand deep discounts and forbid restaurants from making the deal public. The challenge is how does a delivery app become big enough to do that? Feels like a chicken and egg problem.

Look at how the law is formulated: "A food delivery platform shall not X without Y."

X is the action the law allows or prohibits.

Y decides whether the action is allowed or not.

If "authorization to take orders and deliver meals" exists, then they can deliver. If "authorization to take orders and deliver meals" does not exist, then they cannot deliver.

"take orders" does not appear in the law anywhere else. It's only in the phrase "authorization to take orders", and in that context the law is only checking if that authorization exists. This particular law does not say when taking orders is allowed or prohibited. This law does not care if a platform is taking orders. It cares about whether the platform delivers, and it cares about whether the platform has "authorization to take orders and deliver meals".

-

Edit: Pretend for a second the law said "A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food delivery platform to own puppies and deliver meals prepared by the food facility."

Would that law have any effect on whether the food delivery platform can own puppies? Nah. The restaurant has to say "you are allowed to own puppies" before the platform can deliver, but that law is not imbuing the puppy clause with any other power. It neither allows nor disallows actual puppy ownership.

-

So my main point is not that a platform should get cheeky by trying to take orders but not deliver, or something.

It's that even if they're not taking orders, this law blocks them from delivering. If they don't have the authorization, they can't deliver, end of story. The restaurant didn't say they can have a puppy, so they can't deliver, and it doesn't matter whether there actually is a puppy.

This exact thing is happening to one of my favorite local pizza places. Very frustrating for them.

The point is that the stated reason for the law is impersonation, which is already illegal, but under the guise of cracking down on impersonation of restaurants, the law does much more.