Grubhub denies allegations that it created websites for restaurant partners without their permission, says the service was included in their contracts
James B. Cutchin / Los Angeles Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
Grubhub's 2019 denial is the opening move of a five-year arc the related coverage traces end to end: within months the company admitted it had been adding restaurants without their permission after a restaurateur found her Thai restaurant listed on Grubhub and Seamless.
That admission fed a pattern of enforcement — the DC AG's hidden-fees suit and its $3.5M settlement, then the $25M FTC and Illinois settlement that cited adding restaurants without consent among its allegations. The 2019 contract defense matters because it shows the company's position shifting from 'we had contractual right' to 'we shouldn't have done it' as regulators closed in.
First-order effects
- Restaurants on Grubhub's network face an immediate question about who controls their online presence: pages they never ordered can intercept customers who searched for them by name.
- Grubhub's legal exposure hardens around its own contracts — if the service was 'included,' the terms themselves become evidence in any dispute over consent.
Second-order effects
- Regulators treat the practice as a template: the DC AG's later hidden-fees case and the FTC's $25M action both target the same family of conduct — platform actions taken on merchants without clear consent.
- Rival delivery platforms come under the same consent scrutiny, since listing restaurants without permission is cheap to replicate across aggregators competing for inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the enforcement pattern holds, merchant consent becomes a structural requirement for marketplace platforms — contract fine print stops being a shield for creating storefronts, listings, or fees on a business's behalf.
- The arc from denial to admission to nine-figure settlements suggests platform-vs-merchant disputes migrate from PR battles to standing regulatory oversight of how aggregators represent the businesses they list.
The trend: Delivery marketplaces are being forced from contract-based claims over merchant listings toward explicit-consent standards enforced by state AGs and the FTC.