India's restaurants just won a four-year battle for customer data access from Zomato and Swiggy. But here's the twist: this "victory" comes precisely as the industry becomes more platform-dependent than ever.
While the NRAI celebrates phone number sharing, investors are pouring billions into QSRs and cloud kitchens—business models that assume permanent platform capture. With delivery platforms extracting 16-30% commissions and controlling discovery, logistics, and customer acquisition, data sharing is less a power shift and more a pressure valve.
The real story? Restaurants are betting that platform-enabled scale will overcome platform-extracted margins.
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