One way to take over a network is to start with an alternative front end. We'll see if this works out for AI companies. First you have the AI consult booking.com whenever someone asks it to book a hotel, then you get more and more hotels to directly communicate with the AI company, then you drop booking.com once you have enough.
It’s exactly what I’m building. First I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and then leverage that to build a decentralized, interoperable marketplace.
It won't work. The future gatekeeper just has to threaten to send traffic to your competitor if you (a hotel) don't sign an exclusive agreement with them.
So marketplaces will not allow users to have their own storefronts and websites? Most restaurants on DoorDash have a website where prices are cheaper. AI will allow your computer go to that website and place the order. How could Doordash stop that? How many restaurants would be willing to take down their website to appease a marketplace?
Yes, but those businesses are normally started with the premise of only selling on DoorDash and Uber and they provide you a commercial kitchen. I’m talking about actual restaurants with storefronts, websites, and significant sales outside of these marketplaces. A restaurant like that wouldn’t close down their other sales channels just to stay on a marketplace.
Ghost kitchens might since that’s the only sales channel they are utilizing.
I couldn't disagree more. These are intermediation businesses, that is they've inserted themselves as an intermediary between customers and providers. Everybody hates those businesses, ultimately.
Over time, profits tend to decrease. To a point you can counter that by expanding and entering new markets but ultaimtely you reach the point where your only options are raising prices and/or cutting costs. To maintain this you often need to engage in rent-seeking behavior (eg national ISPs lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal).
As an intermediary, Uber needs to increase their margin at the expense of the driver, the customer or both. Same with DoorDash and all these others.
You see this when people try and start intermediary businesses like MyClean, TaskRabbit, tutor services and so on. They all face the problem that the customer and provider are always better off leaving the platform and dealing directly because the value-add of the intermediary is a lot less than what they charge to justify their profits.