Why is GrubHub buying thousands of urls similar to restaurant names, and launching 'shadow sites'?

GrubHub is buying up thousands of restaurant web addresses, and also appears to publish shadow pages without owners' consentsometimes in direct competition with real websites, reports The New Food Economy.

Why would the app-based restaurant delivery service do such a crazy thing?

It looks like the reason may be -- shocking, I know! -- predatory greed.

H. Claire Brown writes:

The New Food Economy has found that GrubHub owns more than 23,000 web domains. Its subsidiary, Seamless, owns thousands. Weve published the full list here. Most of them appear to correlate with the names of real restaurants. The companys most recent purchase was in May of this year.

Grubhub purchased three different domains containing versions of Shivanes restaurants namein 2012, 2013, and 2014. I never gave them permission to do that, she says.

Shivane believes GrubHub purchased her restaurants web domain to prevent her from building her own online presence. She also believes the company may have had a special interest in owning her name because she processes a high volume of orders. She rattles off a list of names of local restaurants that she suspects may be in the same predicament. I find versions of about half those names on the list of GrubHub-owned domains.

Additionally, it appears GrubHub has set up several generic, templated pages that look like real restaurant websites but in fact link only to GrubHub. These pages also display phone numbers that GrubHub controls. The calls are forwarded to the restaurant, but the platform records each one and charges the restaurant a commission fee for every order, according to testimony from GrubHub executives at a hearing at New York City Hall on Thursday.