So let's say you own a restaurant joint. Bob's Asian takeaway.
You enter your phone number and opening hours; phone number 123-45-789, open 12.00 - 22.00, mon - sun
One day the phone goes suspiciously quiet. A customer stops by your shop, and orders something. He mentions that he tried calling, but the number he got on google must've been wrong because some automated robot message.
You decide to google your own restaurant, and sure enough, the phone number that shows up is 800-00-123. But your keen eye also spots that the link to the restaurant isn't www.bobsasiantakeaway.com, but rather www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com
Any way you try to search, the top results only point to that website, phone number, google maps location, etc.
Suddenly a sales rep from some company calls you, and offers you a deal - if you pay [x€ month], they will help with increasing your sales. You say OK, I'll try.
Not too long after, calls and orders start coming in a before. You try to call 800-00-123 from your private cellphone, and sure enough - the phone at work starts ringing. You click on the link www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com, and you're redirected to www.bobsasiantakeaway.com
If you stop the payments, no more phone calls and no web traffic.
You change the name of your restaurant? A new version of the above pops up immediately. You report it to the relevant authorities, but you're told it could take months and months for them to look at your case...you can't survive 6 months with minimum sales.
For some unfortunate small fish, that's sort of how it works.
Then you may take a less generic name and trademark it (USD 400 ?). This should put a stop from it, at least using it in a domain name for food.
"Bobs Fusion Cuisine"
I am not in the food industry. But after having read this, this would be definitely something I would consider. But maybe too much for a Mom and Pop shop. In fact, I have found Mom and Pop shops extremely difficult to do business with.
How do they change the phone # and the website of your business?
They don't. They push you down the search results through SEO and link-farming on their giant web empire.
Anecdata: my neighbour runs a doggy day care. She's been flooded with 1 star reviews (clearly not from her customers), and received similar coercive phones calls to help her improve her online presence. Not much she can do about it, as Google is not particularly responsive
The US made leaving fake reviews illegal this year. If they ever start enforcing it, its thousands per fake review.
What if those reviews come outside US? Can they force Google to take them down?
It is trivial to hire someone in Asia to do these kind of fake reviews
Probably fair to say someone in Asia hasn't used a US-based dog daycare provider and should have those comments dropped.
Was there ever anything like a class action lawsuit over this?
GrubHub did exactly the same in the US.
Up to 23,000 domains [1], and listed some restaurants on Google Maps without their permission [2]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/grubhub-registered-23000-dom...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/ghost-kitchens-mystery-grubhub-l...
GrubHub was purchased from Thuisbezorgd.nl (Dutch) by Wonder Group (Marc Lore) a few months ago.
Just to add this to make it more clear: GrubHub used to belong to the same company as Lieferando, and was only sold at the end of 2024. So in a way this comment is more a "yes, they did it in the US as well".
Note that Lieferando is Thuisbezorgd is Just Eat. Different brand names, same thing.
Lieferando must be impressed by their "success story".
Apparently they not only create the website, but also claim the Google Maps listing using the website.
And then go on to extort the restaurants for $$$ to add their correct contact details on the listing.
Agreed. Search engine results is what gives a domain name credibility.
EU has been going hard on "gatekeepers" recently. Good regulation could fix this. E.g. make Google verify each address by sending the business a form in a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
Back in the days Google verified businesses by sending a postcard to the address you have created your business at. The postcard had a verification code which you’d need to enter. Sometimes you'd also had to revalidate the adress ownership every now and then. Unfortunately they do not seem to be doing this anymore.
I had to do this a few years ago, I'm surprised it's not done that way anymore.
Probably got in the way of them making all the money.
Google should be forced to do this, but also I'm pretty sure that this behavior by Lieferando breaks existing laws that just need to be enforced.
When I registered my business on Google maps they said they were going to send a postcard with a code on it to verify us. This was about 3 years ago.
But they never actually did as far as I know, unless one of my colleagues handled it without telling me.
Physical mail, too, is a source of gatekeeping and bureaucracy. It is labour-intensive, expensive, and you are trading your false positive rate of digital impostors for a false negative rate of legitimate businesses struggling with unreliable mail delivery.
I have started several small businesses and never had problems with mail delivery except when the business moved. The only thing labor intensive about it is the amount of junk mail, and if you have a P. O. Box then checking that can be labor intensive. What else am I missing?
Personal experiences with physical mail:
- Post office clerk offered to fill in cheque details for me. Recipient didn't receive the payment and sued the broke 18 year-old me. The clerk likely pocketed the money. This was over a decade ago, but coincidentally a Czech post office clerk was sentenced this week for pocketing ~$140k over a 2-year period.
- The recipient's lawsuit letter didn't reach me in time and was automatically considered delivered, causing further complications.
- DVLA refused to send mail to non-royal mail PO boxes even if the address is the official business address (UK), preventing international travel with the vehicle.
- On a separate occasion, striking Royal Mail workers prevented me from travelling internationally by delaying the delivery of my driving license.
- I used to live in an apartment with an awkwardly positioned letter box. My mail would end up in random places, usually the neighbours' more easily accessible letter box.
- Every now and then my mailbox contains mail addressed to adjacent buildings.
I also help manage a small B2C family business that is on its third address at the moment. We're renting a small section of a larger shop that is within a commercial estate. We don't have access to mail delivered to the official address. It could probably done, but it may be complicated.
> What else am I missing?
Royal Mail is one of the largest employers in the UK.
If you don't have reliable mail delivery, you don't have a business. This is especially true for your online presence in Germany where an address at which you can receive mail is a legal requirement.
I doubt they go out of their way to pretend to be the restaurants they target. That would make for a very quick and easy fraud case.
It'd be much safer if Google were to just take the first plausible website for truth unless proven otherwise, and the first plausible website happens to be the one Lieferando registers.
If Google were a responsible company, this wouldn't even be possible. You'd need to enter something they send you over the physical mail to verify that you do indeed do business from a specific address. From there on you'd be able to verify the phone number as well. Google's tendency to display scraped data as facts is what empowers companies like Just Eat Takeaway/Lieferando/Thuisbezorgd in their abuse.
> but also claim the Google Maps listing using the website.
And they may even comply with "Delivery-only food brands" policy [0] of Google Business Profile. Although I think their strategy it is stepping on thin ice and risking ban, including search index ban of the main domain.
[0] https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?sjid=1244...
> Diese Restaurants müssen ihre Einzugsgebiete hinzufügen und die Adresse in ihrem Unternehmensprofil ausblenden, um Kunden nicht zu irritieren.
Not removing the address from their delivery listings seems like a straight-up violation of Google's policy.
This sounds like criminal fraud.
Related recent discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44094784
Slightly tangential, and this might be controversial, but hear me out.
I think we need an alternative to DNS as we know it. Here in India, millions of successful business owners have never heard of DNS. They run profitable enterprises entirely through WhatsApp and use social media pages for their marketing presence.
The reason is straightforward: social media platforms have made it incredibly easy to establish an online presence. These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them.
This pattern extends globally. Remember when celebrities maintained their own websites a decade ago? Today, most have abandoned personal sites in favor of social media followings in the millions.
The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people, so they gravitate toward walled gardens. While this creates platform dependency issues, it also reveals a fundamental UX problem with how we've structured the web's addressing system.
Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users, rather than expecting everyone to become amateur system administrators.
In other words, it would be enough for the chamber of commerce to offer a one-page-per-company index. Pre-populated automatically with all the legally binding contact information and offer a field or two where the company can put their Instagram-like profiles with lots of pictures. And allow people to comment on them.
One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads).
They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things.
Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this.
I have a mildly entertaining story for you! We have something just a little like this in Viet Nam.
It's designed as a public good that lets you look up businesses by their tax ID. It's mandatory for the company owner to put their phone number and address there. The address is periodically verified by an actual person. It gets scraped heavily, and inserted into a whole sub-genre of similar websites with mostly identical features but with faster and better search. I've even seen people print it out to make "phone books" that are sold at trade shows!
As you might expect, the resulting increase in (fairly sophisticated) scam calls makes me unlikely to pick up my phone. So I'm not actually reachable there with a call, but I might get a text! For my websites, registrar info for those ties in to the system above using digital signatures. So using only a domain name, you get the company license, a theoretically valid phone number, and a very probably correct address.
It's a mix of good and bad, but overall I really like the system. Looking up other companies before doing business with them has saved me and my colleagues from a number of bad deals, e.g. not the real company owner, or misrepresentation of the scope of their company license.
This is exactly the stuff that prevents innovation and drives entrepreneurs out of those economies. Physical address?!
It can be a letterbox. The point is that there needs to be a way to contact a company in such a way that message delivery is provable and legally binding.
AFAIK no universally adopted modern form of communication fulfills both.
How do the US solve this problem ?
I'm not so sure it can be a letterbox. When registering companies with the Handelsregister in Germany, I think there is a legal requirement to have a physical address. At least from my experience.
In the US, most (all?) states require a local registered agent with a non-PO box in the state. A lot of companies do good business as registered agents for out-of-state and foreign companies, where they file the paperwork and forward mail to the desired recipient.
In Australia, all companies must have a registered address, available on the register of companies (which isn't quite as open as I'd prefer, it isn't nearly as good as the UK's Companies House, for instance). This physical address must then have a plaque showing the registered company name roughly at the door.
In reality, just like in the Paradise Papers leaks etc, an individual accountant's office might have 4000 of these lined up next to their door.
Of course, for the vast majority of businesses, this is not much of a hurdle, and for most consumers it isn't all that helpful either, but end of the day, scammers are gonna scam, whatever the obstacles are. Even those that aren't outright scammers, will be paying accountants to have a plaque on their door to show that this is their "physical office" ...
Hopefully such efforts at least help courts assign some blame when the time comes.
It cannot be a letterbox. You must provide a real address that has capabilities to receive mail.
Luckily for a few euros per month you can rent quite nice addresses and the relative mail forwarding services (e.g., once a day, once a week, etc.)
You are right, that what I meant when I said letterbox.
I should have looked up the definition, before using the word.
Given how easy it is to do e.g. DMCA abuse, or claiming random videos on YouTube, I'd say they haven't solved it. There's even a lovely weird expression for it, fly-by-night companies.
Why would you need to hide your company if you are not running a scam?
maybe your company is just home.
When I see an imprint and see that it's a home address, I have no problems with that. It lets me know that this person is either just getting started or simply doesn't want to grow into a bigger company, probably because he/she has a real job, which are both great things, but if they scam me, I know where to contact them.
Why would I randomly show up at their house and ring their bell?
The “a sane person wouldn’t do this” argument is really not that good.
Neither is the "criminals might abuse it so we should make things worse for everyone else" argument.
Many companies start in the "garage" and if you have privacy concerns, you can't use your home address as company address. This requires you to rent a spot in a coworking that allows you to use their address as company address. Also, you need to get a second phone.
Too many small inconveniences for a small unprofitable startup that you need to worry about, instead of focusing on finding product market fit.
Why do you think the company needs its right to privacy but the customers that deal with that company don't need the right to know who they're dealing with ?
For your startup, aren't you setting up your DNS, webhosting, etc? aren't these small inconveniences that you're doing instead of "focusing on finding product market fit" ?
Each company, nay, each person has to do some amount of "paperwork" in order to create society that functions. Why should your startup admin be easier then my filling of personal taxes ?
One isn't a customer until they decided to get something from the company. But the website is available to everyone.
At least here in Germany, you shouldn't use your home address for your business at all, because of Tax obligations, at least when you are not renting.
Because if you want to move your business later, when it grows, the tax office will regard your home as part of the business. Things will get complicated that way.
Disagree with everything you said. These are all self-created non-issues.
Out of all things that prevent innovation, this is probably the simplest with a "pay to fix it" solution. And the amount is not even that high.. we're talking about a few euros per month.
Unfortunately, in Germany, there is a legal requirement for a business to have a physical address when registering it with the commercial register.
How is that unfortunate? What would we gain from letting businesses opt out you being able to contact them?
Something where you're reachable for any legal purposes- in Germany this sadly remains a physical address.
There are various service which offer a 'virtual' address with digital forwarding of letters for less than 10Eur/Month, so it's not an insurmountable obstacle.
The same stuff prevents massive scams
It not only prevents innovation, but it also enables fake industries, such as companies that harass and "fine" you (not legally binding) for not having an imprint even when not required, or otherwise coming up with irrelevant "problems" with your imprint and reporting you to authorities.
Huh? Why would that be harmful at all??
Entrepreneurs hate responsibility
I imagine that most people hate random Internet crazies showing up at their homes.
When one starts in a garage, one doesn’t have an office yet.
It also defends against random internet crazies who are mad at you because you scammed them.
That's probably most of what it does, because how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?
> It also defends against random internet crazies who are mad at you because you scammed them.
Or think you scammed them! Crazies gonna crazy.
> how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?
I think that anyone who has dealt with the general public in any organisation (scouting, church, business, government) will tell you that a surprisingly large number of people (I have seen estimates as high as one in four!) are crazy to one degree or another.
I would very much rather not have my home address out there for every Tom, Dick & Harry who thinks that my software is making the aliens send radio transmissions to his teeth.
I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies who will take it away at the first sight of something they don't like with zero (legal or otherwise) recourse, sometimes in an entirely automated manner. Like it or not, ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be (even though Tier1 ISPs can be easily pressured into dropping/blackholing by activists, and some of them are activists themselves).
> I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies
You, me and entire HN is aware of this but who is going to educate millions of people who are already dependent on these services.
To be fair, we're not talking about millions here, it's genuinely billions.
Easily half of the world's population now have internet access, and vanishingly few ever manage to scale the walls of the beautiful gardens big companies graciously built for them.
Isn't that the idea behind an alternative to DNS? I think OP meant that we need a similar system based on clear rules and international cooperation for social media, in addition to host names.
> ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be
With emphasis on mostly. I believe most of the issues we have with DNS and name allocation could be solved if they were managed by an actual international non-profit organization. Alas, ICANN is an American for-profit company, whose corruption needs no more evidence.
If you don’t trust ICANN (and the generic top-level domains which they manage directly, like .com, .net, etc.), you might place more trust in the country code TLDs – which are independently managed by each country – where you may find a country with a more acceptable amount of corruption. Preferrably also in a country in which you have a legal presence.
AOL keywords? The benefit of DNS is that it's also sort of able to segment out globally, though that mostly works for smaller companies.
In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you.
I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem.
On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number.
Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.
This is an interesting take on the current situation, and I definitely see it here in Portugal. Lots of businesses with signs with only a WhatsApp number and a QR code for payment (MBWay). This said, it seems like any system for discovery will have technical hurdles (a registration process, a way to apply updates, renewals, validation, etc). I agree that the landscape is changing, but it feels very challenging to establish an alternative to something like DNS without a lot of the same hurdles that come with it today. I would like to hear your perspective on what this would look like.
Social media platforms aren't the answer, they're the crutch. What you've described tells me it needs to be more straightforward to establish and grow your online presence on a foundation you control (or at least one where the owner has some true accountability to you).
But you still get the same problem, no? Limited good WhatsApp handles. Just domains are older, more common internationally and have had longer to be hoarded.
WhatsApp doesn't have handles. Only phone numbers. You print the phone number on a big sign on the front of your business, underneath the name of the business. If your phone number changes, you get a new sign or paint over it.
With the acknowledgment that it’s a controversial opinion, I think the most important ‘domain’ tied to our identity is our appearance, most importantly our face. I’ve been advocating for a time that we need to think about a ‘DNS’ that, in discrete, decentralized, decoupled steps, goes from the appearance of real-world things to meaning/language to links to digital things.
I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...
As you get older, or if you get injured or disfigured, what happens? Does your "face card" get declined?
I envision this system as an evolving, fluid mapping of things to hashes, and hashes (or hash-space locations) to meaning, all controlled by users, institutions, experts, and authorities. So if you were to radically change appearance, it’d be down to those who have something to say about you to update where it’s pointed. You raise a good point in general, though, that all kinds of things can change appearance for all kinds of reasons, even to the point of being unrecognizable, and while I can’t think of any examples right now, I bet there are things that do that with some regularity. It’s down to the inputs to the system and their amalgamation into a hash to be robust to that within reason, and the rest of the way for the authors of data to take care of the rest, much in the same way everything written about the artist Prince still applies to him under his later name/symbol, whether it was updated or not. Same for brands that rebrand, countries that change hands, etc.
PKI infra and public trust CAs support this already via vetted identity certs. Nowadays these certs require picture ID from some determined compliant government org.
IE; your signing, email, encryption certificate public and private key are uniquely tied to your face, name, etc. You can do this privately. I can't think of a negative to this system in terms of risk, bloat, fatigue.
All this though assumes you support public certificate authorites and their practices. which is a bit of a walled garden on purpose, and tbh these types of certs aren't really needed right now.
That seems like a difficult problem to solve if "not having a real website" isn't stigmatized (it totally is as far as I'm concerned).
There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/
That’s a great point.
Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once.
Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?
The issue with DNS isn't that it's too complex; from a purely technical standpoint, it's a fairly simple technology, no more complicated than email, or http. People have created all kinds of abstractions over technology to make it accessible over time. An instagram handle hides a mindbogglingly large amount of complexity going on underneath, and people find that simple enough.
It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy.
The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.
Maybe we should register social media handles into the DNS. Then you can advertise your domain and smoothly transition to them. Not exactly solving this, but handles are equally important than web server ip addressses or mail exchange ip addresses.
Bluesky is a great working example of this.
This is such a weird take. This is not a problem per se on the technical level.
> Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users
Isn't this why search engines became popular in the first place? Because they "solved" discoverability? And before Instagram and WhatsApp existed, they worked fine.
Isn't the reason businesses moved to Instagram and WhatsApp is because people moved to those services? and not the other way around.
Well if you are a Jeremy Renner fan, there was just the app for you...
> These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them.
Yes. Until they lose their SNS handle for whatever reason and then they find out what some of them actually do care.
As long as only a minority of businesses lose their access to WhatsApp, they'll just be outcompeted by ones who follow Facebook's law over India's law.
I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of business that prints a number on its sign out the front, anyway. If it does change, you could go back to the business and read the sign again.
> I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of busine
AGREE WITH NUANCE
Yep, any form of SNS is just a convenience for them and not the main method of interaction with clients. But for some of them it is the main method and for them losing the access could be quite devastating.
The argument that DNS is too hard doesn't really appeal to me. There are a billion and one WYSIWYG websites that let you register a domain and host some static site on it, all from one convenient web interface. I see loads of adverts all over the place for things like Squarespace and Wix. There's nothing hard to grasp about DNS if you offer it to users in an intuitive way. I imagine if Meta gave users a button that let them rent out a domain and have it redirect to their Facebook page, then many would take it up. There are a lot of people already using services like linktr.ee, so I can imagine a market for tying that page to a domain.
I think the biggest issue is that people have just gotten used to putting @MY_BUSINESS_NAME in their advertising and it's what most users know how to deal with. I reckon most users have never manually typed a URL into the address bar in their lives.
To all the folks saying this is a terrible idea and you shouldn't put your trust in big tech companies: you're absolutely right but also wrong.
This is just one of things that "works" and you can't really get around. Tangentially related but one of my friends started a photo booth rental business and was asking me about how to build his web presence. At first he suggested a website and I told him he should have a website but I also told him that an solid Instagram account (we are in the US) would work just as well.
Is it batshit crazy on a conceptual level to get into bed with a big tech company for your web presence? Yeah it absolutely is. But does it actually work and is the most likely way for you to drive sales? Yeah it absolutely is.
> The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people
You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc.
Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.
Given the recent US administration that‘s a bad idea.
With DNS you are somewhat independent, with social media you’re one executive order away from shutting down the whole economy
Lieferando should spend more time building a good app instead of registering domains. In my experience, they are by far the worst delivery service in Berlin . They’ve also operated long before Uber Eats, Wolt, etc. The only thing they have going for them is some mindshare as the first in the market. I can't understand how they're still around.
Their app experience is a disaster. Feels weird rooting for Uber Eats and Wolt, but they're also head and shoulders better.
Well I bet moves like that outlined in TFA helps keep them afloat.
Have you ever told the story to Spiegel, Zeit or Böhmermann? I think as many people as possible should be aware of the unethical lieferando practices.
Wonderful to see all kinds of nefarious world domination plans are attributed here.
The gist from inside: * Whether restaurants want a domain is an onboarding yes/no question. * If they no longer want it, removing them is a simple message to the customer service from the partner.
Whether they fully understand the yes/no question is debatable at times, however, for that I point you to the easy fix in the second part should they change their mind. Feel free do disbelieve me if that aligns more with your world view.
INAL but it is my understanding that this practice (registering a website with the same name of an existing third-party restaurant) is already a break of various existing laws, at least potentially.
But, frankly, for small restaurants it's already difficult to make ends meet, so who's got the means to actually take a company like lieferando to court?
For the .bg domain, registering a company with the same name as the domain allows you to appeal to the registry and get the domain. It's the same if you have a trademark.
for any TLD/ccTLD including .bg if you have a trademark you can get the domain even if its registered by someone else - its a very simple appeal process - Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy
For a small restaurant, wouldn't it be easier to rebrand but making sure they own the domain first?
I know this is not ideal, but pragmatically speaking, this might be simpler and cheaper.
Every previously loyal customer would believe the restaurant changed ownership and is no longer a known quantity.
If anything, a rebrand is much harder if you are small. If McDonalds rebranded to a new name that would make national news, and their consistent and well-protected branding and large number of store locations would make it very clear to potential customers that little except the name changed. Small restaurants have non of that
Case in point: the sign outside the fast food establishment might say "Macca's" instead of "McDonald's", but I know little has changed otherwise.
IMO "not ideal" is still a euphemism. Even if you do this, often throwing away decades of branding, there is a high chance that Lieferando aka Just Eat Takeaway.com will still not only register a similar domain again, but that it will rank higher than your website anyway, even with the "worse" domain.
You have a small restaurant, often using things like WiX or Squarespace, against a tech company with a dedicated SEO team. Good luck.
The thing is, even "small" restaurants can have decades worth of history and clients may not recognize a new name. That, combined with German tendency to believe that "the Internet is Neuland" and not care about it, is now proving disastrous.
When websites becomes useless and predatory, looks like more and more small places are doing Facebook pages only. Easier for them, but going to centralised Zuckerberg Internet only is not ideal.
For a Takeaway company, they sure seem to be falling short of EEAT (pun intended).
Maybe it's time for someone at Google to take a look at this abuse like they did when the industry called out Forbes Advisor.
Google will never handicap Google's revenue.
German legal system is really odd.
they did that also in Austria, years ago
Amazon did that. In their very beginning, they registered a ton of domains, but in absolute numbers it probably pales to contemporary squatters.
Is it ethical and legal to do it? A similar case happened in India for a domain "Jiohotstar.com" - a student bought the domain anticipating the merger and make some money out of it. But the Jio filed a case against them and they had to sell it to someone in dubai for a lot less money.
I suspect that doordash does the same thing...
You can always guess how shady a company is, if by looking at the whole web site...there is no mention easily found anywhere of who the directors or management team are.
You have to follow the track to their owner who ultimately is nothing more than some Dutch managers saved of their mismanagement by a buddy Dutch Investment fund ....owned by a South African base...that is a front end to Chinese investments via Tencent Holdings...
But hey...they have a Ethics hotline and can think of multiple ethnics violations to report here:
https://app.convercent.com/en-gb/LandingPage/d8e86634-ec59-e...
Domain squatting should be illegal
Apparently they not only create the website, but also claim the Google Maps listing using the website and then go on to extort the restaurants for $$$ to add their correct contact details on the listing.
This is worse. They are using them to "steal" direct customers.
Agree, this is deceptive, and highly annoying as consumer too. There must be some consumer protection laws in the EU that can be used against this?
Sadly not, the corrupt ICANN seems out of reach of European regulators.
These are ccTLDs, though, ICANN is out of the picture there, they have no authority after delegation. It's the fault of DENIC, the German ccTLD local operator. DENIC is a German entity, they are very much within reach of regulators.
(That's also the reason why foreign ccTLDs of, eh, semi-stable countries, e.g. .so domains, are risky - should the local operator start to lose it at some point, no-one can help you, neither ICANN nor IANA)
The domain registry isn't even relevant here - the authorities can go directly after Liferando - who are doing business in Germany - no matter what TLD or other medium they use for their fraud.
They could fracture the internet. I expect even the threat would bring ICANN into line.
Judging from their handling of the American-dominated search, email and cloud shenanigans to the EU's detriment already, the EU probably can't even conceive that the infrastructure giants like PCH even need to be threatened yet. They are very slow on the uptake.
Yeah and it feels Germany more than other EU states is dragging behind in everything IT related.
Perhaps the problem isn't as much the lack of political will, but rather lack of competence.
The lack of competence is downstream of a lack of vision. Fix it and the competence will come. Don't fix it and every attempt to imbue competence will fail.
> corrupt ICANN
Could you elaborate?
A recent example is what they first did, and then tried to do, to .org in 2019.
Domain ownership should be progressively taxed. House ownership too for that matter. With houses it's easy to prevent tax evasion by splitting the ownership between multiple entities (because companies shouldn't own housing), but it would be almost impossible with domains...
Property taxes mean you never own your home: you just rent it from the government.
You "own" the property because people agreed on that people can "own" land. Same people agreed on tax ownership. Like they agreed on other kind of taxes.
I'm sorry to be this blunt, but this is a stupid argument. You already "renting" your plot of land from the government. Without government, your home has no protection at all and you own nothing.
You should be able to protect your home yourself, but the government doesn’t let you. It’s simple blackmail.
I have no idea where you live. As a European, I think that what you just said, is batshit insane.
I trust, and I have to trust, that my government acts (mostly) in my interest. If I stop doing that, I'm at war with my own government and I leave the "moral territory" of democracy. Nothing good can come out of that.
You have chosen to put yourself in a position where either you think the government acts in your interest or you have to be at war with your government. The answer lies somewhere in between.
That's like saying that you never own your car because you have to put fuel in it for it to run, or need to have it registered / tested, or you need a licence to be able to operate it.
If you redefine "own" to mean whatever suits you, yes, you're right.
There has to be tax. It’s probably better and fairer to tax wealth than to tax income where possible. So yes tax homes more and income less.
Renters end up paying the property tax as well. Sure, the landlord handles the money at some point, but there’s a solid argument that the tax is ultimately paid by the user rather than the owner.
The point of a progressive home ownership tax is to make it a better deal for more people to own their own homes.
That's true of all taxes. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be any taxes. We should also be able to agree that taxing wealth is preferable to taxing income, at least morally, because hard work should pay a little bit more, and simply owning things should pay a little bit less.
I'm simply arguing that work is taxed too much in comparison to wealth. I am not saying taxes should go up even more in general, necessarily.
> Domain ownership should be progressively taxed. House ownership too for that matter. With houses it's easy to prevent tax evasion by splitting the ownership between multiple entities (because companies shouldn't own housing), but it would be almost impossible with domains...
Taxes aren't the answer for everything. And they are already taxed in the EU, it's called VAT.
Emphasis on progressively. Tax is just a placeholder word, we can call it fee if that helps and just burn the money if you don't trust anyone to handle it well. Your first domain is $10/year, your 1000th domain could be $100k/year.
> Emphasis on progressively. Tax is just a placeholder word, we can call it fee if that helps and just burn the money if you don't trust anyone to handle it well. Your first domain is $10/year, your 1000th domain could be $100k/year.
More taxes isn't the solution to every problem, that's reasoning is absurd. Who's going to force every country to apply a tax on domain names? Which government? That whole idea is stupid.
I said as much in my original comment. It's not possible. But it would solve the problem of domain squatting. But it won't, because it's not possible to implement.
It is not allowed with some domain names such as .DK where you can complain if you see a domain name used in that way.
it is illegal if you have the trademark you can use the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy to get it back
DENIC (who controls .de) has its own (very... German) dispute system: https://www.denic.de/en/service/dispute that they would rather you use. It requires mailing a form to request information, then mailing a form to send a dispute (don't be fooled by the web forms or PDFs, those are just tools to generate the documents you need to print, sign, and send).
Their FAQ lists why you usually don't want to go for UDNDR when you can help it, though: https://www.denic.de/en/faqs/all-faq#code-106
ICANN's procedures are all nice and dandy if all three parties involved are in the USA, but when it comes to international disputes (in this case the Dutch company registering the domains and the German business being impersonated), things can get pretty complex and expensive real fast.
How is it different from real estate which people have been hoarding without using for centuries?
Land hoarding should be illegal too. But it's especially egregious when it comes to domain names, as you're paying fortunes to rent imaginary strings of characters, made scarce for absolutely no reason since we have an infinite supply of them.
We don't have an infinite supply of the abc.com domain, there's just the one. That's the whole point of DNS, to provide unicity across the whole network.
If they're registering a .de domain and violating trademarks I think this would be a great picking for IP lawyers
I think the problem is that most local restaurants don't have trademarks nor the acumen/money to register them because they never figured they'd have to fend off things like that.
Agreed. Germany does have a good class action equivalent, which an IP lawyer would be interested to pick it up. Companies such as AXA have been forced to pay back millions to customers for simple discrepancies in their legal terms and conditions for example in the past.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/bgh-urteil-rueckzahlu...
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I would like .COM domains to ~ 1000$ per year. As these domains are intended (and actually are) used for COMmercial ventures, the sum should be low enough to not be a burden on even a small real business, but be high enough to not be economically viable for squatting.
This wouldn't solve anything. People would just start using a cheaper TLD, which will attract squatters again.
It's telling that they do this without fear of kinetic repercussions from their victims or more bureaucratic consequences mediated through the state.
I hate how despite all the rhetoric on HN surrounding how much better ethics companies in the EU must have to comply with regulation, as soon as that regulation slips, they turn out to be equally scummy as the rest of the world.
Companies anywhere have no ethics. If you want them not to do things that have negative consequences to others (squatting on domain names, polluting the environment, etc.) the only way to do it is to have laws against the behaviors and enforce them (ideally with fines that exceed the financial gain the companies get from the behavior so they don't just see the fines as a cost of doing business).
Lawmakers and enforcers anywhere have no ethics. If you want them not to do things that harm the public (passing corrupt laws, selectively enforcing rules, ignoring corporate crimes, etc.), the only way to stop it is to have strict accountability systems and enforce them; but wait, they are the accountability system and the enforcers. Uh-oh.
> Companies anywhere have no ethics
This is bullshit, plenty companies have plenty of ethics.
I don't disagree that laws are important, but to claim that companies can't behave ethically removes responsibility from the people who are, primarily, responsible. To behave as scummy as Lieferando has been doing here is a choice and plenty similarly successful companies have not done things this bad. People make up a company and when these people behave badly, we should call them out and not only say "it's the government's fault for not making/enforcing laws about this!"
How is it bullshit?
> but to claim that companies can't behave ethically removes responsibility from the people who are, primarily, responsible.
That's literally what happens today everywhere. Companies are downright evil everywhere and nobody's held responsible.
But what I think GP means is that companies don't inherently have any ethics since they are not people.
If a company behaves ethically it's because its owners and employees are doing so, but the company can't have any ethics of its own.
Regular people doing their day to day jobs on these criminal health insurance companies, for example, will perform acts that are extremely unethical as an individual, but since they're representing "the company" all that goes out of the window.
> we should call them out and not only say "it's the government's fault for not making/enforcing laws about this!"
We can call them out but we, the people, can't enforce anything. Maybe we could collectively try to sue them, but at best that's a civil lawsuit and they'll have to pay a bit of money (likely an already accounted cost for businesses that use shady tactics). But to make that criminal, as many times it should, then only the government is empowered to.
But we should never forget that we are the ones that keep the government accountable. If they don't do their job and we let them, it's all of our faults.
I mean, one of the reasons companies exist in the first place is to allow individuals to behave unethically IMO. Anyone can do bat shit crazy things that they would never get away with when they're behind the protection of a company.
> Companies are downright evil everywhere and nobody's held responsible.
As the co-owner of a small company I'm more than a little offended. We're not evil at all, we try our best to do right by our customers, our people, and our community.
The idea that no company can ever be held responsible for anything is a weird ultracapitalist pipe dream (and consequently a marxist straw man). Companies are groups of people. Yes we need laws to restrain badly behaving companies but that does not mean people running badly behaving companies get a pass until an inevitably slow and imperfect government gets their shit together.
I'm happy that there are exceptions, but the fact is that most companies will throw ethics out of the window the second it hits profits. It's easy to be ethical when it's for free.
> The idea that no company can ever be held responsible for anything is a weird ultracapitalist pipe dream (and consequently a marxist straw man).
I never said that. What I said is merely what we see in today's capitalism: barring a few exceptions, companies are almost never held responsible.
Probably one of the most egregious examples of this is the health care industry in the US but we often forget how banks ruined millions of people's lives in 2008 and almost nobody from the big banks went to jail. We bailed those criminals out and they felt zero consequences. They got a pass.
I agree with you that nobody should get a pass, but I'd be naive if I said they don't.
> until an inevitably slow and imperfect government gets their shit together.
How else are we going to do anything? Aside from taking justice into our own hands like Luigi Mangione, the best we can do is try to sue them and spend huge amounts of money to maybe get them to pay a small fine. Or perhaps employees inside of these companies can be whistleblowers and blow up their own lives trying to get some sort of justice.
I hate that this is the reality we live in but we can't pretend it's not.
I'd wager the the majority of small and medium business in my hometown act ethically. You pick out the worst behaving faceless bigcorps and generalize that to every company out there. But the vast majority of the world's economy is small local companies. By and large, these companies aren't evil. Also some larger companies try their best (eg eco-banks, brands like Patagonia, etc). I'm not saying they always succeed but to blanket call all of these "evil" as you keep on doing is ridiculous.
Companies exist for one reason: to generate profits. There's not way around it.
An ethical company will pay fairer wages, will not exploit users, apply dark patterns, stifle competition, etc. and non-ethical companies will do all of the above to generate more profits than the ethical one.
In the utopian world where there's endless competition, perhaps people could choose the ethical companies and they'd win fair and square. But the second you add reality back in, you add monopolies, oligopolies, geographical restrictions, etc. into the mix and these companies can get away with whatever behavior they want since consumers don't have a choice.
That's not even accounting for the fact that many people couldn't give a single f** to ethics, as long as they can buy their products for cheaper. Many would love to care, but simply cannot afford it, since all companies optimize to compress salaries.
I could go on, but hopefully my point is clear. Traditional companies will eventually become evil in their pursuit for profits even if they don't intentionally do so.
Ethics is not part of the equation at all.
It's bleak but until I see proof that this is incorrect, my point stands. Both the logical conclusion of capitalist theory and the real world we live in right now agree. Small and medium businesses are not yet big enough to optimize themselves to become evil (although it doesn't stop them from being evil for other reasons). Since the end game of competition is monopoly, we can see how big conglomerates are straight up buying up the competition which will eventually tip the scales to being a majority of big companies.
The reality is that the only businesses that stay small are the ones that don't scale. Otherwise big players would've already swooped in and enshitified them.
I'd love to imagine when I grow my company I'll be ethical, fair and structure it in a way that the goal is to make everyone in it rich while producing something good. But the most likely outcome is that it'll get crushed by competition that will not care or if I hit big, it'll grow enough and become evil.
Wherever there are human beings, a subset of them behave unethically. The EU is a more regulated place, but stuff like this happens all the time. It is a continuous process of improvement. The status quo is never going to be ideal - it should be the trajectory of change that we always have to be mindful of.
> It is a continuous process of improvement
Or, to be less charitable, a cat-and-mouse game.
If there were regulation, this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, there is no regulation against typosquatting, Google is free to trust whoever they wish for compiling their database of trusted addresses, and DENIC has no policies preventing someone from doing this with .de names. The best restaurant owners can do is file a trademark lawsuit, maybe call the cops on Lieferando for fraud, and hope for the legal system to decide in their favour.
Also, nobody is saying companies are more ethical in the EU. In many cases the existing legislation forces unethical companies to comply with ethical regulations, but they don't do it because they're nicer than companies outside of the EU.
I hate your rhetoric, it's defeatist AND builds on a strawman. Nobody implied that companies would get "better ethics" from regulation.
I guess I should have said "need to have" better ethics in order to comply with legislature. :)
I am wondering: does a domain still matter in 2025? Nobody is accessing websites by typing the domain name anymore, are they? If gasthauskaiser.de is taken, I feel like I have dozens of other options. Anyway, there's probably hundreds of pubs called Kaiser in German-speaking world. So what's teh real value of a domain like gasthauskaiser.de?
The problem in this is, that lieferando captures the search results with these domains. They effectively cut the business off of their main customer source for their domain. After doing this, they force the business to get onto their platform. This way they extort money out of a business.
So your question is backwards because local dealers had a working solution for their business, but "startups" like lieferando destroy that just to sell and control their own solution. So now the domain is worthless, but only because of lieferando et al.
The same happened to booking hotels. Now every hotel room is 20 to 30 % more costly because booking.com forced themselves between the business and the customer and they take their cut.
doctolib is trying to do the same with doctors in europe.
But how do they cut you off, if you can acquire plenty of other "nice" domains? I understand this worked many years ago when .com domain was a must-have, but that's not the case anymore with tons of TLDs, smarter search engines, and very little direct "type-in" traffic, is it?
This is only anecdata, but it happened to me more than once, that I typed in google the name of the restaurant and was couldn't find the real website of the restaurant over the fold, because the ads and the results are spammed with lieferando, and others.
As a restaurant in a situation like this, you now have to compete for the search results, which isn't your main business. You want to sell pizza, not do SEO, or SEA. And then lieferando calls and tell you something like "hey, it's a shame that nobody is buying from you, right? Well, we can help for 10% of your revenue..."
Booking.com didn't force as much as you state. People use them for different reasons than them being first on the Google results page. Most hotels also do not make any effort to capture online sales, even though 95% of guests make their reservations online.
In this context it matters because Google maps shows only one website when you search for that pub, if the extorters put their website there first then you can't put your real one
I believe you can. 1. You can submit correction, 2. You can claim ownership of the actual business.
Your own profile here on HN suggests otherwise. ;)
What you mean? I don't understand.
I can't click your website or email, I have to type it again. Especially with the ' at '.
I am fascinated why would someone downvote a genuine question. What's wrong with people?
SEO mostly. Weird domains get downranked because they are favored by scammers (as they are cheaper). Plus, you still need somewhere to host your website, so might as well get a domain that's not too ugly.
Yeah my point was that you can get plenty "not too ugly" domains. Quick search:
- kaiser.restaurant is free - restaurant-kaiser.com is free
5 seconds of work, both probably better than gasthauskaiser.de tbh.
> I am wondering: does a domain still matter in 2025?
It totally does and it's not mutually exclusive with a social media presence. And now that many people are using LLMs also for searching, if LLMs do redirect to your domain it's bingo.
There's this fantasy that people only ever use their phones and social media and that computers do not exist anymore. Then there's the real world where people actually work and they're all on real computers and they do look stuff in either good old search engines or using LLMs, by typing on an actual keyboard and looking at the results at an actual screen.
If you're showing food recipes or Minecraft vids: fine, your social account will do. But for anything related to the real world, where real people doing real work in actual offices may be looking you up, a domain shall greatly help.
In addition to that: many people at work are also using their actual computers to look up personal stuff. Looks more serious to do it at the computer than on a phone.
And as as been pointed by several in this thread already: at least its a presence you can control without being at the mercy of a single company.