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

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

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

#181

Post by RHSeeger »

powerapple wrote: post #117
paranoidrobot wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between what delivery services like Doordash and what Taxi companies are doing is that Doordash is holding themselves out to be the company. There's several instances where Company A has had Service Provider B set up a website in the name of Company A, update Google Listings to replace the Phone number and website of Company A with their own version of the site. Then when an unwitting customer calls th…

I totally agree with you. The business of Doordash should be legal while the exact practices you described above are illegal.

The problem is how to allow the former while preventing the latter, in a way that is reasonable for small businesses.

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

#182

Post by ineedasername »

kgantchev wrote: post #161
MichaelApproved wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating and defending a trademark is very expensive. Many restaurants would prefer not to spend this money just to prevent unauthorized listings. They’d rather delegate the responsibility of preventing unauthorized listings to the state attorney who has more resources and expertise.

That's not true. A trademark costs around $300: https://www.uspto.gov/trademark/trademark-fee-information Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free. The only time you need a lawyer is if they refuse and you want to sue them. If the court rules in your favor, you can even sue them for the legal costs and costs of damages.

And when the massive corporation that rose to dominance by ignoring local laws also ignores your DIY cease & desist letter, you're out $300. Heck, they'd ignore it if a lawyer wrote it too. Filing a lawsuit would be required, which they'd also ignore and delay as much as possible, far more than the local pizzeria can afford, until there was a class action.

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

#183

Post by newman8r »

learc83 wrote: post #175
bitlevel wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. And how about this: If you get food poisoning from a restaurant, you deal directly with them to resolve. If the food has been delivered by a 3rd party, what rights to resolve would you then have? Restaurants can simply state that the food was tainted after it left them, delivery firms can state the food from the restaurant was bad, etc etc.

I agree with the sentiment. But you basically have no recourse if you get food poisoning from a restaurant. Unless it’s a mass event, there’s no way for you to prove it was the restaurant, and even if you could prove it, your damages aren’t likely to be enough to sue.

I had an old roommate try to sue in-n-out after getting severe food poisoning. It actually went to court - the in-n-out attorney completely destroyed him, he was outgunned. They showed receipts for thousands of people who ate there that day and that there weren't any other cases reported.

Reporting food poisoning if it ever happens to you (even if minor) could be the difference between someone else being believed of being shut down.

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

#184

Post by wayne »

swyx wrote: post #15

always entertaining how regulation unintentionally acts to increase barriers to entry for incumbents. in this case closing the barn doors almost a decade after the horse left the stable. you couldn't pay politicians enough for the favors they perform in earnest. edit:to elaborate, the growth hacks of the likes of Doordash and Postmates doing exactly this got them their start, now it will be illegal to compete with th…

It does seem messed up that we see a bad behavior, create a law to ban that behavior, and the law's biggest beneficiary is the company doing the bad behavior.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

ummonk wrote: post #109
ramphastidae wrote: post #105

This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…

Why does that require anything other than enforcement of existing trademark law?

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by syshum »

ummonk wrote: post #109
ramphastidae wrote: post #105

This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…

Why does that require anything other than enforcement of existing trademark law?

Why enforce existing law, we can you use this opportunity to create ever more complex laws to ensure stake holders that already abused to the condition the law is purporting to address can maintain their advantage and ensure no new entrants to the market

That is all this does, it protect GrubHub, DoorDash and other large players from competition

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

#187

Post by DGAP »

swyx wrote: post #15

always entertaining how regulation unintentionally acts to increase barriers to entry for incumbents. in this case closing the barn doors almost a decade after the horse left the stable. you couldn't pay politicians enough for the favors they perform in earnest. edit:to elaborate, the growth hacks of the likes of Doordash and Postmates doing exactly this got them their start, now it will be illegal to compete with th…

Exactly. If I'm in California and I want to challenge the incumbents with my cool new idea about how to do delivery better, now I can't. There's no way to effectively scale a sales team in the beginning to reach out to all these restaurants. And as you said, all the successful incumbent players already used this strategy to become big, now this won't materially affect them. They already have sales agreements in place with all the biggest sellers on their platforms.

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

#188

Post by syshum »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #150
s_dev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the downvotes -- I think there is a genuine question here. There isn't the need for more laws just enforcement of existing ones. Purporting to represent someone elses business is an egregious infringement of trademark.

The answer is likely that our legal system is too expensive for local restaurant owners to afford the cost of suing a grubhub sized company. Restaurants are a business notoriously prone to failure and low margins. Maybe a class action lawsuit would work in this case, but mostly it’s just another case where the legal system needs to be fixed to rely less on having money for justice to occur.

This is what Class Actions, and Business organizations are suppose to be for

Also nothing is stopping the AG of the state from forming a Fraud case agaist the major players.

The excuse of "well the courts cost too much money" is not abated by creating even more complex laws that will still require an expensive lawyer to enforce

in reality this law is designed to protect those companies that already made billions on abusing trademark laws by making it seem like what they did was legal, a "loophole" in the law that is now "closed" for new competitors

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

#189

Post by rattray »

ramphastidae wrote: post #105

This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…

IDK, this seems more like a mixed-bag to me on account of being opt-in instead of opt-out. Absolutely I agree that businesses should be able to easily opt out of being listed on a given delivery platform if/when it causes problems for them.

But on the flip side, I've observed a lot of restaurant owners not having the time, energy, or know-how to set up even basic online things that could really boost their business.

I would expect that many restaurants really benefited from Doordash adding their menu to their website without their knowledge (even if some have, in net, suffered).

Going straight to opt-in seems like it could hurt some businesses.

Not to mention, of course, any new entrants! This law will make it much harder to compete with "the next Doordash".

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