No images? Click here Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss NYC’s data-sharing mandate for restaurant delivery apps, the fight for a crypto tax-reporting carveout, and how to realize the promise of the massive railroad funding in the infrastructure bill.
NYC’s delivery-app mandate to share data with restaurants is a missed opportunity
Karina Montoya The New York City Council recently approved five bills to protect small restaurants from the power of delivery apps such as Grubhub, UberEats and DoorDash, as the eateries have become ever more reliant on their service to weather the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these bills, a first: an order for delivery apps to share some data collected from consumers — name, phone number, email, delivery address and the contents of their orders — upon the restaurants’ request. The move is important. Until now, restaurateurs were not able to access their own customers’ basic information from the food apps, which can especially hurt thin-margin shops that want to develop direct ties to their own clientele. But the City Council also missed an opportunity to stop these same dominant intermediaries from then selling the data about these sales to other third parties. One key result of this missed opportunity was that the City Council left itself open to criticism by the delivery apps for actually undermining the privacy of the restaurants’ customers. The bill in question, Intro. 2311-A, comes with certain provisions for data privacy. For example, apps will have to provide a way for customers to opt out from sharing their data with restaurants. The eateries, in turn, are not to sell, rent, or share such data in exchange for financial benefit. But the bill still allows the dominant apps to sell personal data to third-party vendors, unless they opt out. A more desirable outcome for data protection is achieved by offering consumers an “opt-in” button, for those who don’t mind having their data sold to third parties. Data privacy advocates have been pushing for this change for years. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 introduced the right to opt out from this practice — a big achievement then. Today, one of the organizations that supported it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is pushing to amend the CCPA for the sale of data to an opt-in default. New York City could have taken a first step in this direction for the big platforms. “We want the default to be privacy,” Hayley Tsukayama, legislative activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Open Markets. “If you want consumer choice, let’s give them the opportunity to opt in if they want to share their data with a company. [The City Council] could have definitely done that,” she said. According to a recent study by pCloud, 52% of apps share user data with third parties, with UberEats in the top 10. Dede Lahman of Clinton Street Baking Co. says restaurants have measures in place to protect their customers’ information. For advertising, she prefers to build a direct relationship with them, mainly through Instagram. "I am directly talking to my customers who are opting in because they seem to be interested in me," the co-owner of the Lower East Side café said. "I’m a bricks-and-mortar, dine-in restaurant. I never wanted to turn into a delivery machine." Most big food delivery apps have gotten even bigger in recent years. In 2013, Grubhub merged with Seamless. In 2019, Caviar merged with DoorDash. A year later, UberEats acquired Postmates after dropping a $6.5 million deal with Grubhub to dodge regulatory scrutiny. The intermediaries also increased their commission fees, which now vary from 15 to even 60 percent of an order’s sale (One of the bills approved in New York City extended a 15 percent cap until February 2022.). In late 2020, complaints from restaurant owners about the business practices of these companies prompted calls from the Congress and antitrust groups for the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation into market consolidation and anti-competitive practices.
The cryptocurrency lobby fought for a tax carveout. They lost — for now.
The Open Markets Institute’s Alexis Goldstein helped block an intense effort by the crytocurrency lobby against language in the infrastructure bill requiring major participants in cryptocurrency markets to send tax forms to the IRS and to their users. Right now, individual crypto investors bear the burden of figuring out how much they owe in taxes, since crypto trading platforms don’t send them the same kinds of forms that stockbrokers do — leaving them to rely on expensive third-party sites. The language is part of a plan to increase taxes on cryptocurrency transactions to help pay for new infrastructure investment. The win helped to ensure passage of the infrastructure package. The win also helps lay a foundation for ensuring that cryptocurrency does not pose unnecessary risks to individual users or to the financial system as a whole. At present, “decentralized finance” or DeFi, is a Wild West, where the lack of “Know Your Customer” is often proclaimed as a feature, and scams can proliferate. Commissioner Dan Berkovitz of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has warned that DeFi risks developing into an “unregulated shadow financial market.” As Goldstein told The Washington Post, carving DeFi out of tax reporting requirements would lead to most of the market moving to this underregulated space. OMI prepared a fact sheet outlining the dangers of exempting large portions of the crypto markets from tax reporting. The fact sheet was cited in The New Republic. Goldstein was also quoted by Politico and MSN. The fight may heat up again as the infrastructure bill moves to the House.
Amtrak Joe vs. The Modern Robber Barons The bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday contains an unprecedented $66 billion for expanding Amtrak and rebuilding America’s freight railroads. The legislation promises to furnish a better balanced, more fuel-efficient, and environmentally friendly transportation system. But as OMI Policy Director Phillip Longman explains in a Washington Monthly feature article published this week, for any of this to happen on any meaningful scale, the Biden administration will need to do more than invest more public money. “It will also,” Longman writes, “need to reverse decades of deregulation, lax antitrust enforcement, and other policy blunders that have left latter-day robber barons in control of nearly all the nation’s highly monopolized railroad infrastructure, just as they were in the worst days of the Gilded Age.” The issue is key to solving many of America’s most pressing problems. For instance, Longman details how financiers have captured control of America’s major railroads and begun stripping them of their assets to maximize short-term profits. One result is that Amtrak finds it increasingly difficult, and in some instances even impossible to maintain existing passenger service, let alone expand it. Another is that a huge volume of freight that should be moving by rail is instead shifting to pollution-spewing, pavement-pounding, long-haul trucks that kill or injure some 156,000 Americans a year. Longman explores solutions ranging from full or partial nationalization of railroads to once again regulating them as utilities as America did until the 1980s. Longman’s piece also ran in Daily Kos and was mentioned in Bloomberg. 🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:
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NIKKI USHER'S NEW BOOK
News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism Nikki Usher, a senior fellow at Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism & Liberty, has released her third book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. In her latest work, Usher offers a frank examination of the inequalities driving not just America’s journalism crisis but also certain portions of the movement to save it. “We need to radically rethink the core functions of journalism, leverage expertise, and consider how to take the best of what the newspaper ethos of journalism can offer to places that have lost geographically specific news, “ says Usher, an associate professor at the University of Illinois-Champaign. “The news that powers democracy can be more inclusive.” Usher is also the author of Making News at The New York Times (2014) and Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code (2016). News for the Rich, White, and Blue, published by Columbia University Press, is available as a hardback, paperback and e-book. You can order your copy here. 🔎 TIPS? COMMENTS? SUGGESTIONS? We would love to hear from you—just reply to this e-mail and drop us a line. Give us your feedback, alert us to competition policy news, or let us know your favorite story from this issue. |