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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

#91

Post by powerapple »

foobar1962 wrote: post #6

There was a post a few months go about a pizza place that started getting customers complaining about their food arriving cold and damaged: except they didn't offer delivery. They discovered that a popular search engine was offering free delivery. The story ended with them ordering dozens of pizzas from themselves to themselves and making a nice profit.

lol. That's nice. I can see from the trademark point of view, it makes sense to stop other people from listing your business in their list, brands should be protected. But providing a service for customer should be legal. It would be the same as Taxi drivers should be able to pick you up from your home to a business without the permission of the business.

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

#92

Post by frombody »

WalterBright wrote: post #65

If a person decides to buy a pizza from X and then sell it to Y, don't they have a right to?

I believe every country has laws against distributing food if you don't have some sort of approval from some sort of health and safety department.

If you do it once, nobody is going to care, but if you try and make a business out of other people's food, you'd best be compliant.

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

#93

Post by aquadrop »

carbonx wrote: post #78
WalterBright wrote: post #65

If a person decides to buy a pizza from X and then sell it to Y, don't they have a right to?

I think the issues is a problem of transparency. I deliver for Postmates and I really think that most of the customers don't really understand that they might be ordering from a restaurant that isn't partnered with Postmates. The knock on effect is that often the menu isn't really correct, so the customer gets their order "wrong" and calls the restaurant to complain.

Then the law should be about making it clear status of the restaurant. Just forbidding everything seems like wide sweep action that can stifle a lot of other good/innovative business models. Not something government should do.

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

#94

Post by Razengan »

purplecats wrote: post #8
Razengan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the apps thought they were doing the restaurants and users both a service, but not every restaurant always feels that way.

no, this was just another means of money extortion. they masquerade around like the companies they're preying on, then effectively blackmail those companies for connecting them to these customers. unnecessary man in the middle. they're essentially the capitalist version of the cymothoa exigua parasite species.

If customers prefer using a single "middle man" for a category of products or services instead of going to each company directly, then somebody's going to cater to that.

> cymothoa exigua parasite species.

Well, that's an interesting TIL.

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

#95

Post by ratww »

devcpp wrote: post #87
ratww wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core issue here is that some platforms were creating websites and phone numbers to impersonate the companies. In practice it's a man-in-the-middle attack. This is what the law seems to intend to stop. I'm pretty sure that if I falsified a website to resell services or products on behalf of a larger company I would get slapped by a lawsuit, trademark or otherwise, but it seems that for small restaurants th…

Then why not make impersonation illegal? If they enforce making reselling illegal proactively they can enforce making impersonation illegal just the same. This is overreach. I would be rightly pissed if I lived in CA.

Someone else has mentioned that impersonation is certainly already illegal, and the right solution would be prosecution instead of making a new law, and I agree. I'm not from CA/US so I have no idea why the legislators felt the need for a new law.

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

#96

Post by jeffchien »

supernova87a wrote: post #49

I admit that I have yet to reconcile my own somewhat conflicted feelings about these recent bills (e.g. the one voted on in Nov 2020 about drivers as contractors, versus this one). For example, I'm in favor of regulating tech companies from misrepresenting restaurant menus as their own, and extracting a hefty margin off restaurants' barely-surviving profits by merely being a middleman aggregator. Yet on the other han…

I don't think this particular law (AB2149) is just a b2b issue, which is how I interpret your opinion to be. I think that this is a consumer issue as well. For example, as you said, I think unapproved listings are more prone to misrepresent menus and hours, especially the latter during these turbulent times. In one extreme instance, I've also seen a delivery site start listing a restaurant that has never been open for business.

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

#97

Post by Slartie »

frombody wrote: post #80
ljm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doordash priced the pizza at $16, but the pizza place charged $24. Presumably a 'growth hack' to get more users. The pizza place, seeing the difference, bought pizzas for $16 and received $24 from Door Dash, so for each purchase they were $8 better off. They also ordered plain pizza dough in larger quantities, for more profit. Presumably because they didn't have to actually make the full pizza.

Technically they didn't have to make any pizzas at all. I always felt like the story about the dough was embellished a little bit to avoid being charged with fraud.

They had to produce something that could legally be called a pizza to at least fulfill the purchase contract with DoorDash and avoid making themselves legally liable.

But what would probably have worked would be to pull this off with two restaurants, each ordering pizzas from the other, with them sending the same physical pizzas around all the time. Cold and old pizza is still legally a pizza, just a bad one.

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

#98

Post by paranoidrobot »

powerapple wrote: post #91
foobar1962 wrote: post #6

There was a post a few months go about a pizza place that started getting customers complaining about their food arriving cold and damaged: except they didn't offer delivery. They discovered that a popular search engine was offering free delivery. The story ended with them ordering dozens of pizzas from themselves to themselves and making a nice profit.

lol. That's nice. I can see from the trademark point of view, it makes sense to stop other people from listing your business in their list, brands should be protected. But providing a service for customer should be legal. It would be the same as Taxi drivers should be able to pick you up from your home to a business without the permission of the business.

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 the number given, they're actually talking to Service Provider B, not Company A.

Taxi services don't hold themselves out as the personal driver service for the company you're going to.

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

#99

Post by ratww »

roenxi wrote: post #75
ratww wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber Eats or Uber Taxi? Uber Eats doesn't engage in the practices this law is trying to curb since they already have agreements in place with the restaurants (AFAIK), so you won't have to phone up anyone if you use Uber Eats. If you're taking about Uber the Taxi app, or some courier service, then this law doesn't apply to them since they're not "food delivery platforms", and you can just ask them to order on your beh…

> Uber Eats doesn't engage in the practices... Doesn't change the fact that the law is silly. Every time I leave the house I wear closed in shoes. A law forbidding me from leaving the house unless I'm wearing closed in shoes would be silly. This is a law that is arbitrarily preventing people from doing something that is perfectly reasonable - acting on behalf of a third party to order food. If legislators want to ban…

The general agreement here is that the law was made because Doordash/Postmates were impersonating restaurants without authorization from them and taking orders in their behalf, so it's not exactly similar to your shoes examples.

Most people find the impersonation and lack of transparent unreasonable. Whether the law is the best tool to fix it or whether it will have side effects is what's in debate, but the main intention of the law seems pretty clear to everyone.

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

#100

Post by forrestthewoods »

I’m completely fine with apps listing restaurants without permission. But ONLY if the app makes that explicitly clear.

To falsely pretend to offer a sanctioned service is fraud imho. There’s all kinds of issues with this. Such as who to blame if an order is incorrect. Or who to complain to when prices suddenly increase.

This law kinda sucks. But the status who is fraud at worst and dishonest at best.

As far as regulations go this one seems mostly fine.

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