That would surprise me. It's unlikely a dozen apps would be able to coordinate like that. The thing about cartels is the first defector can cut prices and capture marketshare, which is what we're supposed to believe evil VC funded cutthroat startups are inclined to do. Raising prices to increase profit but reduce revenue growth is the exact opposite of that.

The other hypothesis is that delivery is simply expensive. The driver has to drive to the pickup place, find parking, stand in line potentially for awhile, drive to the delivery, park again, walk to the delivery location to drop off the item. Most of those things an ordinary uber fare would not have to deal with.

This is naive. Cartels are a market failure, and your argument against cartels existing is that market forces in an ideal world would prevent them.

Reminder that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded to keep engineer compensation below market value[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Well that's also just a naive view. Industrial Economics takes a deeper look at this for example.

Or, this is more like TicketMaster and less like a free market.

The concert case single monopoly that controls both part of the source as well as basically all sales is now comparable to the pile of separate delivery services that compete against each other.

A claim that all of these have formed a cartel requires strong evidence.

The pile of delivery services is effectively 3, right?

And 2 of those are potentially combining.

It's possible collusion is a factor, however another observation I've had could explain it: the VC-finance industrial complex - in that there are dominant incumbents who have so much profit that they simply buy any up and coming new competitors in the market, to which the founders and VCs are happy for that payday. Or you have two big companies doing mergers, giving multiple advantages including a bigger pool of profits/revenues to leverage and outbid their other large competitors in the market. This is the main reason that they're all able to continue to charge arguably unreasonable and unnecessary fees to restaurants, because the barrier to entry is heavily having enough funds to build such a platform - and the gatekeepers are in the VC industrial complex where most want unreasonable returns (requiring unreasonable, excessive fees and other grey or dark practices) and an exit event in 10 years.