HB 1279 / Chamber Neutral in Part, Opposes in Part
According to the bill’s author, Rep. Robb Greene (R-Shelbyville), House Bill 1279 is intended to allow restaurants to stop “third party food delivery services that are dishonest actors” from delivering their food. Senate sponsor Chip Perfect (R-Lawrenceburg) empathized with the legislative intent, stating that the damage done to restaurants is “hard to measure in terms of value lost.”
The problem HB 1279 seeks to solve is preventing drivers of third-party food delivery services (or apps) (e.g., DoorDash, UberEats, GrubNow, etc.) from jeopardizing the integrity of the food that they pick up and deliver to customers.
Yesterday, Sen. Perfect offered a second reading amendment that attempted to close a loophole in the bill that exposes search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.) from a private cause of action. Unfortunately, his amendment missed the mark and failed to alleviate our concerns.
The bill, in its current form, exposes search engines to liability because delivery apps use them to facilitate orders, and in the process share customer data with those search engines. In other words, GrubNow is the merchant of record, but Google is treated like it’s the one responsible for food orders gone bad.
In 2021, Google helped provide $4.82 billion of economic activity for tens of thousands of Indiana businesses, nonprofits, publishers, creators and developers. More than 353,000 Indiana businesses received requests for directions, phone calls, bookings, reviews and other direct connections to their customers from Google. And Google helped train 163,000 Hoosiers on digital skills.
The Chamber lacks similar data from other search engines, but clearly, they are valuable resources for Hoosier companies and residents. Alphabet (owner of Google) and Microsoft (owner of Bing) ranked 11th and 12th, respectively, on Forbes’ Global 2000 for 2022. As such, these companies become immediate targets for plaintiffs’ attorneys looking for loopholes in the law.
Unless HB 1279 is amended, search engines will face the choice of either delisting restaurants en masse, deactivating seamless online ordering options or obtaining signed agreements with nearly every restaurant that a customer can search and find on Google that also includes an “order online” option. No state with similar laws invokes this quandary.
We agree HB 1279 helps our food and beverage retail members from a “product integrity” standpoint. Our fear is that it will do more harm than good from a revenue perspective – for all Hoosier restaurants.
ACTION UPDATE: The bill passed third reading unanimously on Monday.
