The Costs of Convenience: A Case for Regulating Online Food Marketplaces in the Public Interest (original) (raw)

2024, Journal of Food Law & Policy

As digital platforms have become more popular, including those relating to food ordering and delivery, the range of both their positive and negative impacts have become more apparent. In response, governments in various jurisdictions have made efforts at regulating such platforms, as part of their mandate of balancing complex and often competing goals in the public interest. Unfortunately, attempts at governing digital platforms to date have largely proven ineffective at checking the power of the large corporations that are behind their growth and expansion. Drawing on two relatively recent developments at the intersection of food, infrastructure, technology, and governance–namely, Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations and cloud kitchens–I argue that a critical assessment of these new forms of online food marketplace further supports the need for robust regulatory oversight of digital platforms, including through enforcing existing standards established in food laws. Due to their capacity to introduce long-term and broad-scale impacts into our societies and economies–marking a transition towards a world increasingly dominated by the interests of private enterprise–it is important to ensure that all relevant regulatory regimes can appropriately uphold the shared and core values that protect our health, environment, civic life, and capacity for flourishing writ large. In so doing, regulatory responses need to appropriately account for the wider context in which such platforms operate, including the values and priorities explicitly or implicitly embedded in the platform business model and in understandings of regulation in the public interest.

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