Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut
It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value.In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced the restaurant this was a good deal?What value did they provide here?Meanwgile, Yelp used to be a resource to find good businesses. Now it's... Something else. It's leveraging it's market power to make money rather providing customers with any value.I don't know what the answer is but it feels like society needs to come up with a new word, new idea, (or probably an old one we've forgotten) and make it both an ethically bad thing and then also an illegal one (or at least one that is taxed higher).