> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.
Suppose I pay a marketing firm money to run an advertising campaign to promote my business. They wouldn't be violating any laws by using my trademarks as part of doing this job, according to the contract we signed.
That is what Grubhub claims they are doing. They aren't doing this to random third-parties - just restaurants that signed up with Grubhub's marketing service and agreed to allow them to do these things in their terms of service. Unfortunately, in this world of EULAs that are far too numerous to ever read and understand, most of the restaurants didn't realize what they were signing up for.
This behavior absolutely scummy, but the question of whether it is legal is more of a contract issue than a trademark one.
I was once told in the some countries you're not allowed to mention your competitor directly in an ad. No idea if it's true. At first I thought it was a bad idea but maybe not?
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.
https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...