Molson Hart

No restaurant is at the mercy of delivery apps. If the fees charged are too high, they can hire their own delivery people, have a website/app that accepts orders, and acquire customers online like any other business. It's the restaurants choice to participate.

Sure, but the customers may demand the restaurant participate in their preferred app for convenience. If an app is successful in establishing network effects as they all try to, it may foreclose the restaurant’s ability to attract potential delivery customers elsewhere.

If a marketplace business successfully establishes a quasi monopoly and then tries to extract monopoly rents, people are understandably unhappy about that.

time to unplug the internet then

There's a pretty strong normative argument for regulating ISPs like other utilities, isn't there? And people do in fact complain all the time about the injustice of their cable bills; they're just helpless to do anything about it.

sorry you missed my point, i meant if you dont like consumer facing demand aggregators being able to establish quasi monopolies than you need to end the internet because that's the way it is

I didn’t miss it...I just don’t see the logic of why the ease of aggregating demand on the internet grants businesses unquestionable pricing power? Given that the internet tends toward monopolies doesn’t that validate the concerns of the dispersed customer/suppliers?

Sure if we start with Google and work our way down, it's an interesting conversation to have. But its a total rethink of the entire digital world, which you may be in favor of. Under current constructs, food delivery apps are no more nefarious than any other consumer marketplace.