GrubHub / Seamless — the assembling and saving help that earns its money byeating aside at the already lean profit tolerance of local restaurants — is accused of , well , finding a new and unusual mode to use up away at eating house net income border , and it involve purchase up tens of thou of website domain name without restaurants ’ permission .
The flakey schema , first reported on byNew Food Economy , involves Grubhub purchase rights to use URLs similar to the name of restaurants already listed on the platform and having them point to “ shadow page ” that only serve to direct possible customer into their ecosystem . Combined , Seamless and parent organization Grubhub appear to hold the names of over 30,000 field , though not all were approachable . data point compiled by New Food Economy indicates the company began buying up these domain around 2010 and has continued to do so as recently as May of this twelvemonth .
What deviation does it make if bryanscoolhouseofpizza.com is own by me or by the program where I ’m probable to betray a lot of pies ? Well besides the general creepiness of setting up websites for entities that are , ostensibly , your suppliers without require them , GrubHub orders infer a portion of an guild ’s revenue as a fee — something that the restaurant would get to sack if you , say , request the food via phone or their own online ordering system . give the popularity of GrubHub , it ’s not difficult to imagine the platform have a monolithic advantage in hunting rankings .
Photo: Mary Altaffer (AP)
A adept many of these eatery may have no interest group in set up a site , and these Grubhub - only placeholder pages might be mother order that would n’t have occur in otherwise . Others compete directly with website that already live :
Take , for representative , Molly Hatchet ’s Sub Shop in Daytona Beach , Florida . The real Molly Hatchet ’s can be found atwww.mollyhatchetssubshop.com . GrubHub ’s varlet , purchased in December of 2018 , is available atwww.mollyhatchetssubshopdaytonabeach.com . The substantial Molly Hatchet ’s has its own online ordering system that has nothing to do with GrubHub . The GrubHub trace page for the workshop expose a different phone number ( because commission ) and unite only to GrubHub .
Reached for comment , a GrubHub representative separate Gizmodo that the company “ has NEVER cybersquatted,”—a term we did not use in our query . “ As a service to our restaurants , we have create microsites for them as another root of orders and to increase their online brand mien . Additionally , we have read domain on their behalf , consistent with our restaurant declaration , ” the spokesperson write , “ We no longer provide that divine service and it has always been our practice to transfer the domain to the restaurant as shortly as they request it . ”
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