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.
"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.
It is trivial to hire someone in Asia to do these kind of fake reviews
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.
And then go on to extort the restaurants for $$$ to add their correct contact details on the listing.
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.
But they never actually did as far as I know, unless one of my colleagues handled it without telling me.
- 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.
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.
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...
Not removing the address from their delivery listings seems like a straight-up violation of Google's policy.
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.
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.
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.
AFAIK no universally adopted modern form of communication fulfills both.
How do the US solve this problem ?
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.
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.)
I should have looked up the definition, before using the word.
Why would I randomly show up at their house and ring their bell?
Too many small inconveniences for a small unprofitable startup that you need to worry about, instead of focusing on finding product market fit.
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 ?
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.
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.
When one starts in a garage, one doesn’t have an office yet.
That's probably most of what it does, because how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. Until they lose their SNS handle for whatever reason and then they find out what some of them actually do care.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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? :/
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Are there any good resources/blogs/people/etc I should look at to learn more?
With DNS you are somewhat independent, with social media you’re one executive order away from shutting down the whole economy
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.
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...
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?
I know this is not ideal, but pragmatically speaking, this might be simpler and cheaper.
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
You have a small restaurant, often using things like WiX or Squarespace, against a tech company with a dedicated SEO team. Good luck.
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.
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.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/bgh-urteil-rueckzahlu...
(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)
Perhaps the problem isn't as much the lack of political will, but rather lack of competence.
Could you elaborate?
Taxes aren't the answer for everything. And they are already taxed in the EU, it's called VAT.
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.
If you redefine "own" to mean whatever suits you, yes, you're right.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My local bakery pays workers that actually do everything to run the bakery as little as possible while the owner has a mansion, sports car and a boat.
It's more likely our definitions of "fair" are very different. Besides, I already wrote why small companies may not yet be evil, which you seem to completely ignore, so whatever, there's no point in arguing anymore if it's not in good faith.
Frankly I'm baffled that you think I'm not arguing in good faith for skipping over an argument as weak as that, and instead choosing to address your general point (which I think is a lot less more sensible, even though I disagree with it).
I agreed with you that small companies are many times not yet taking this to the extreme and might not be as evil as a mega corporation, but they are still evil by default.
We've definitely normalized this, but being normal doesn't make it good.
I didn't mean to skip over that but since it's the entire base of capitalism so I thought it would be implied.
If you had said things like "inherently exploitative" or something like that, then we might've gotten a lot closer. I think I might actually concur with that (but then argue that it's possible for businesses to also do good, eg provide a service that people need and a compelling job and bread on the table etc, that may offset the badness of the "inherently exploitative" part, so that below the line it's a net positive for society). We'd then have an IMO much more interesting argument about how bad it is for companies to, by definition, be at least slightly exploitative, and whether it's possible to offset that or not. By just calling me "evil" instead (for running a business), you removed all nuance.
Or, to be less charitable, a cat-and-mouse game.
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.
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.
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..."
- kaiser.restaurant is free - restaurant-kaiser.com is free
5 seconds of work, both probably better than gasthauskaiser.de tbh.
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.