Stock being up 2% today is myopic and meaningless. Look at the performance over the last year. FWIW, Wall St isn't a bunch of morons trying to financially engineer an airplane to take off.
The post seems to misinterpret that Doordash + Grubhub are somehow in cahoots with Google to skim off of restauranteurs. What Doordash & Grubhub are doing is an extreme form of "growth hacking" that doesn't have any considerations for the collateral damage it creates - they should be held accountable for that. Google here is just the provider of a tool that they abuse, they need to work on ensuring that this form of abuse should not be possible.
To deduce that there's a conspiracy between Google + Doordash is taking it a bit too far..
Doordash lists every restaurant they deem worthy of delivery in a particular area - the restaurant doesn't have to be part of a contractual agreement with them. They call this OTT (Over the Top) where the courier orders the food like a normal patron and gets the food to the customer.
In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do. If they are not, I would think that there is an extremely strong legal case for copyright infringement, especially since Doordash is not even working to generate revenue for the restaurant, but redirecting you to a generic bbq restaurants page.
> Doordash lists every restaurant they deem worthy of delivery in a particular area - the restaurant doesn't have to be part of a contractual agreement with them.
Hm. If they're doing that, and using every restaurant's trademarked content in their ads without an agreement in place, I think that would be a problem legally.
> In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do.
The post explicitly states that there is a contractual agreement:
"Our only recourse is to immediately terminate our contract with GrubHub and DoorDash, which we are considering doing."
> Hm. If they're doing that, and using every restaurant's trademarked content in their ads without an agreement in place, I think that would be a problem legally.
I'm not sure about that. How would non-authorized resellers work then? In the most absurd case, sellers on Ebay wouldn't be allowed to say what exactly they're selling. You would have to list something as "a watch" instead of "Casio G-Shock". Same goes for any used car lot, etc.
The primary cause here would be "trademark infringement", which requires "likelihood of confusion" in the marketplace [1]. Doordash isn't particularly causing confusion here. They do, in fact, sell Saddleback BBQ from Saddleback BBQ. The only source of confusion I can think of is that the link doesn't take you directly to Saddleback BBQ, but rather to a generic list of BBQ restaurants (which Saddleback BBQ is on).
https://imgur.com/a/lv0yYq9