This is like the argument that Amazon has a monopoly, but it's actually even weaker. Doordash is just picking stuff up from local vendors that buyers could visit themselves, whereas Amazon is shipping people things from all over the world.
Amazon has been pretty successful in arguing that Walmart, Nordstrom, and everything in between are their competitors, and I expect that DD and IC will have no trouble doing the same (especially under this administration).
I wouldn't be the one to ask about the details, but I think it would be foolish to surmise that two companies taking up 3/4ths of a sector shouldn't go through some anti-trust scrutiny.
While they are an effective duopoly, it would be good to also consider them as monopolistic competition versus a true market split out -- there is very little traditional moat, and almost only network effect due to restaurants accepting their services and menu.
But economies of scope, such as they exist, can be good for consumer welfare (unpopular as that is to discuss in current public forums).
Two chunks of overhead (IT, web app, mobile app, finance, HR, etc.) instead of one can be bad for consumers too.
But yeah, flexing pricing increases to gobble up consumer welfare is what the FTC is supposed to rally against, and, while services expand their markets aren't that different.
EDIT: Wow, people really hate this comment! I'm not being normative here. Economies of scope are the thing that any acquiring companies with any reasonable market share will argue for their case, its textbook economics and what the FTC is trained for.
You’re getting downvoted because nobody gives a rats ass about efficiency for massive corporations that continue to abuse their power and make our lives unnecessarily expensive while their leaders (generally) tear down democracy.
Then I have failed to explain myself. What I was saying is that "economies of scope will reduce prices due to reduced costs" will be the core argument massive corps argue when merging and concentrating market size -- and that rarely happens in reality.
The Doordash acquisition of Instacart increases competition. You are missing something fundamental if you think "2 services becoming one means less competition."
Doordash attempted to buy Instacart in 2021 for $40-50B dollars. Since then Instacart has lost market share and value, and Doordash is now acquiring them for $17B.
The real competitors to Doordash and Instacart for grocery delivery are not each other. The competitors are Walmart, Amazon, and local grocery chains (Meijer, Kroger, etc). And guess what? These competitors are winning. Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger alone comprise a majority of grocery delivery (~64% in 2025, per an emarketer FAQ on digital groceries).
Has nothing to do with monopolies, having the market slowly condense into one mega company does not create competition and results in higher prices for the consumer.
You don't have to have an absolute monopoly. Microsoft was punished for anti-competitive actions in the 90s when it bundled its Internet Explorer browser into Windows.
Even though other browsers existed, like Netscape Navigator etc, Microsoft was still found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and guilty of anti-competitive action, both in the US and elsewhere.
Microsoft was forced to create a version of Windows without IE bundled, and other corrective actions.
To this day while I welcome anti-trust legislation, I don't understand how a "free" thing can be anti-consumer. Both Microsoft and Netscape were not "charging" the customer for this product. While it could be argued the product may generated revenue, the purpose of anti-trust in general is to stop something that negatively affects consumers.
Now the food industry would be my best example that needs more anti-trust. All of my organic brands have been bought out by Conagra Brands. There's no competition.
I would also agree that this specific acquisition is not going to be helpful for consumers.
> I don't understand how a "free" thing can be anti-consumer
If it is only free in order to inconvenience competitors in a way that will eventually reduce choice, either giving you undue control of a market or being done with a view to charge later when people have no choice as the competition is broken, or both - that is when free becomes an anti-consumer matter.
It is an issue that you sometimes need to think long term to notice. If you wait for it to be an immediate problem, it is often too late to easily do anything about it.
Your food example is exactly what people feared would happen with IE, and what actually did happen for a long time despite the anti-trust case: client side developments stalled because IE was such a large part of the market and it did not implement anything new because there was no reason for them to. There was not sufficient competition to make it inconvenient for the incumbent to stagnate, so the whole area stagnated somewhat until Chrome came along and stirred things up a bit. MS was in control due to an effective monopoly, the consumer suffered.
I think the history actually proves the opposite. There was never a version of Windows that I purchased that required me to download Internet Explorer. In fact on the latest copy of Windows - Edge is still pre-installed. Yet Chrome holds a larger share TODAY. There was absolutely no reason for Microsoft to lose that case.
The second most popular browser now is Safari. Should the justice department come after Apple for including it in the Mac?
> I don't understand how a "free" thing can be anti-consumer.
Not 100% apples-to-apples, but I imagine you've heard cases of "big players" in various industries lowering their prices to the point of selling at a loss, which drives out the small players (Amazon, Wal-Mart come to mind). In the end, only the big player is left, and they are now free to raise prices.
I think it's reasonable to see that initial low-prices (could even be free) period of behavior as anti-competitive, since it may ultimately stifle competition in the long term.
I do agree with that. Home Depot has a history of cutting out small lumber yards across the US for charging less for wood. Then when the local lumber yard is out of business, oh suddenly the wood shortage back east is a great reason to raise prices.
But what you're saying is that if a piece of software is popular, free and has no competition, it should be illegal!? And the browser isn't even a great example of that since there are tons of other options! Wireshark is specialty packet sniffing software that has literally no reasonable competition in it's space. It's also free. Should it be banned here?
You should go ahead and read the arguments they lay out.
Here is Khan's report on Amazon: https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
You can disagree, but they at least make compelling arguments that forces one to think.
Isn't that more proof that the consumer won here? Even business consumers? By making IE free, there is no reason to pay Netscape. I'm sorry but this is not an example of a monopoly. Should Wireshark be banned in the United States because it's the best packet sniffer and it's competition is basically 0 right now?
Monopolies are not illegal, anti-competitive practices are illegal; there's a subtle difference.
You're right. Duopolies aren't great either and just because two companies are in fierce competition doesn't mean everything is good with the law. Both companies might be engaging in illegal anti-competitive behavior.
There is also a skyrocketing chance they are colluding via algorithm.
This needs to be discussed more in the age of AI. RealPage was just the eye-opener. Every industry that should be competing on prices has a cottage industry of "price recommenders" that is de-facto collusion in front of our eyes.
>A company with 60% market share gobbles up a company with 25% market share.
Can you be more precise about what percentage of what market? I think you are conflating restaurant delivery with grocery delivery. How would instacart have 25% market share and door dash have 60% and Uber eats have 26% and Grub hub have 8%? Doesn't add up because you are mixing markets.
Instacart doesnt event have 25% of grocery delivery. That was 5 years ago. Instacart's market share is declining - Im seeing 18%. Doordash offered around $50B in 2021 now offering $17B.
The grocery stores themselves are actually the major competitors on grocery delivery and they cant serve other small business like the independent services can.
There is nothing inherently bad about large companies merging and this will increase competition. Deilvery apps are losing to much larger companies (the grocery stores themselves) and offer unique advantages over these direct from grocery services (ie they can serve small businesses).
You sound like the person who said that my town actually had too much competition in grocery stores and they should consolidate to reduce prices for consumers.
Food/grocery delivery should be a municipal service like garbage/recycling with no tipping and service provided by full time government employees with good benefits and use of city vehicles. Many, many new jobs, and a public service that everybody would love.
But DoorDash has a patent on giving you a deal if you combine your order with another restaurant, and giving you a higher price unless it determines that pisses you off and then backing off a little. Those contributions to humanity must be protected.
Many cities already fund taxis. The city of Sunnyvale provides a taxi service under the name of Beam for $3.50 per ride. It does not seem like a big stretch to extend this to food and grocery delivery.
If you don’t want to be taxed for some service, you can always choose to vote to get rid of that service or move to a place without that service. I welcome more experimentation in municipal services.
In America sometimes construction of mass transit requires so much money that it is less cost effective in terms of riders served on a per-unit-cost basis than subsidized taxi. A lot of that tax money goes to intermediate consultants who come up with extravagant station designs that seem to value grandeur more than utility. Another large chunk of that tax money goes to union workers when equivalent non-union workers are much cheaper to hire, and when fewer non-union workers are needed to do the same job than union workers. The sheer size of mass transit projects means they become even bigger. I don’t like this but it is what it is.
personal chauffeur to work and back home for $7 everyday? Not a bad deal. Google says insurance is $180/month(higher end) or $6/day. Add gas, registration, maintenance and this is a good bargain.
If the government is going to get involved here, I would regulate companies like DoorDash or Uber to require them to provide company vehicles to drivers.
When DoorDash drivers subtract vehicle wear and tear, fuel, depreciation, and maintenance from their earnings, their net hourly pay frequently drops below the standard minimum wage.
DoorDash benefits from desperate people who slowly transform their vehicle into cash by laboring thousands of hours. They could have just sold the car; either way they end up with cash but no car.
People need to pay rent, so they look at their capital, owning a car, and then trade away that capital for less than it's worth, and a few years later they are worse off, but at least they made rent for those months.
We need the government to deliver food to our doorsteps? Shouldn't the stores provide this service? If there were demand and a sustainable business model, wouldn't they? Costco delivers, to commercial customers. I imagine they are not necessarily losing money doing that, but perhaps.
I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly like other utilities then just make it a utility. However as-is, there's little barrier to entry on adding delivery to any business and it should probably stay that way.
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
I think the best idea would be a free and open source Doordash clone. The local government would contract a local company to handle logistics, so it would still be a private company (like garbage collection), but ideally lots of them spread out through the country. Each local government would decide if it's fully paid for by taxes, subsidized by taxes, etc (like garbage collection). City vehicles repaired/maintained by mechanics like school busses, etc.
Or we could just not pass absurd tax hikes to pay for grocery delivery, and then everyone has more money in their pockets and can freely choose to give it to their mothers for delivery. Forcing everyone into it via tax collection is literally absurd.
I basically want to socialize the costs of just about everything if people find it to be a useful public service. I'd like a single-payer streaming service like ITV, too. It gets very annoying to be gouged on all sides by corporations that don't care if the service is good or not, only how much money they can extract from people regardless of their station in life.
So TV licenses are not gouging, but a Netflix subscription is?
You live in a fantasy land if you think streaming services are not competitive and providing better value for money than public broadcasting companies.
If there were economies of scale that enabled it to be more broadly available, and that was competitive in terms of utility gain per dollar invested, why not. IMO the government should be utility maximizing for its citizens, whatever that looks like.
We're socializing the costs of everything else. I'd much rather my tax dollars go to pizza delivery (and single-payer healthcare) than lining the pockets of tech monopolists and the military-industrial complex.
Municipal services like garbage pickup are generally funded by a mix of per-household fees and property taxes. Property taxes loosely correlate with the size of the household (and yard and construction materials and everything else that scales with price) while the per-household fees can scale depending on how big of a collection can you request.
It's a good system for aligning the costs with the people who use the service.
If you thought all tax money went into a big general bucket and the government decided what services to offer out of that, municipal garbage pickup does not work that way.
There couldn't be a free delivery service because the usage would be all over the place. Someone DoorDashing burritos for breakfast lunch and dinner 7 days a week would use it 20X more than someone doing their once-weekly grocery order. Subsidizing it would incentivize a lot of waste, traffic, vehicle usage, and other things that we actually don't want to incentivize people to use more of.
The only way this could work is with a substantial per-delivery fee, which gets us right back to what we already have with DoorDash.
lol, this is the state of leftist discourse online? Now even completely unnecessary services like DoorDash should be socialized so we can all pay for it? This has to be satire.
It surprises me that you are getting such a strong reaction about a service that used to be extremely common and not even cost extra. Used to be - in my part of the world anyway - a greengrocer would come by and drop off your order and take a new one, the milkman would pick up bottles and drop off your milk, the ice man would come. It is hard to go out and do all these things with kids and with day jobs, and it does not take much marginal cost to take care of one more house in the neighborhood. Imagine rejecting receiving a birthday card in the mail as an irresponsible extravagance.
Grocery deliveries for the elderly and disabled are an excellent public service. But it's a hard sell to make everyone pay for stoners to get a $30 burrito delivered at 2am.
Are you kidding me? I don't use these services because I can save a lot of money by driving, taking public transit, or (gasp) walking to buy groceries or food myself. 100% do not want to be taxed to pay for some lazy individuals food delivery.
Is this satire? It sounds exactly like what someone would say if they were trying to parody a big government liberal. The idea of turning an expensive, optional convenience into a government-run service and touting job creatoin is a bit too on the nose.
It's not an optional convenience for some people. And no, not satire. We should be using local governments to drive competition as frequently as possible in my opinion. I believe in municipal broadband and cellular service as well.
I do agree that there is a small minority of people who greatly benefit from delivery services due to disability, hardship, or otherwise, but the thought of tax dollars paying to deliver Tom's crunchwrap supreme because he's a little high and really wants taco bell grinds my gears in a particular way.
I'd have no problem with a subsidized service for those that NEED it, but for those that just WANT it? Nope. But then you get into the sticky messy world of how to determine need.
I'm talking about local governments and not state or federal level, which is out of the scope of this conversation. I agree FWIW, but anyone with any degree of capacity for critical thinking would agree.
In my area, garbage collection is not done by the city, you pay a quarterly subscription to a private company if you want pickup. If not, you take it to the dump yourself. Some of my family live somewhere there are 3 of these pickup companies operating (which also pick up on different days).
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
Love LLMs, use them extensively, but they cannot intuit what actions they can take on my behalf that I will or will not approve of, and therefore I will never use one of these things.
I relate to that, but do you feel it's a fools errand to try and codify your preferences into a list of rules? You'd really only need a 'yes list' for things it can be allowed to do and have it not do anything else
My experience is that if you're not trying to push the use cases very far or very long-running, the last few iterations of Claude work incredibly well for smaller, simpler things, which is already helpful
No shit. The Frontier labs are talking out of both sides of their mouths. They're claiming their models are going rogue while they're releasing cute little data goblins that you should hook up to all of your mail and social media accounts. Seems like it would be a much bigger problem for agentic botnets on cloud-facing personal devices than sandboxed agents.
Unless of course they're deliberately removing safety guardrails and instructing the sandboxed agents to red team stuff in an effort to sell what they're capable of.
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