I don't think it is anyway unreasonable for such service to come to agreement with the restaurant. And absolutely beneficial for both parties.

The question is whether it should be required.

If a restaurant welcomes takeaway orders then whether you order and collect in person or hire someone to do it on your behalf is irrelevant.

That's why I think this bill is ill-thought-out.

If there are shady practices taking place then they should be dealt with with existing legislation and, if needed, with new legislation specifically targeting these practices. Instead, I suspect this will only restrict services and competition, which ultimately won't be beneficial for consumers and restaurants alike.

> If a restaurant welcomes takeaway orders then whether you order and collect in person or hire someone to do it on your behalf is irrelevant.

This is a big if, because existing outcry already belies that this assumption is actually not reality.

Besides, if that’s the case it should be super easy to call the restaurant and ask to be a partner. You can mail them stickers to advertise for your delivery platform by pasting it on their doors/windows. “Official GrubHub partner” could even be a badge of legitimacy because GrubHub needs to protect their reputation as a source of good restaurants.

It is not an assumption. It is irrelevant to the restaurant. The "outcry" is not about that, it's about shady practices and some problems with online reviews, which partly stem from said shady practices, and partly because some people are not understanding the service (this bill won't change that).

All they have to do is get permission from the restaurants.

That's an extra amount of work that keeps new, small players from entering the field. As with a lot of regulation, this is designed in a way that favors large incumbents.

Eh, food delivery is a pretty local business. In fact, if I wanted to compete with these VC-backed companies, I'd probably do something like partner with local restaurants whose food traveled well, come up with some good packaging, etc. Of course, that's not scalable and disruptive.

>food delivery is a pretty local business

?? Food is a pretty local business, but delivery is not. You could say that person delivery is local too, because people mostly transport locally, but e.g. Uber is still global.

To a first approximation, I only care about food delivery to my house. To a first approximation, I only use Uber for places other than around my house.

I grant that there are some economies of scale to having an app that companies in different cities can make use of. But I don't see that as requiring a nationwide company for the actual food delivery.