NY governor signs law making the restaurant reservation black market illegal

Is it’s a felony, Rhode Island is required to extradite. I skimmed the article and I’m not sure if this will be a felony though.

Your point stands for international actors.

Are people normally extradited in civil matters? With the penalty being a fine of up to $1000 per violation, plus options for customers to sue individually, wouldn’t it work like any other civil matter?

Get a judgment in NY with or without the defendant choosing to show up, come after their assets, that kind of thing? Even if they’re Canadian, presumably they’re accepting money in dollars somewhere along the line, couldn’t a motivated attorney come after that cash flow?

https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S9365

Spoken like someone who doesn't live in NYC

The "less legislation" mindset is fundamentally flawed in the US. Most people who espouse it do so because good societies ostensibly don't have tons of legislation. But legislation is a symptom, not the problem. If this legislation isn't present in other countries, it's because they don't have this problem.

We're capable of caring about more than one thing at a time.

When you write something like that, you probably want to add what are "far more important issues to worry over" and why pursuing this legislation would cause delay on that issues. And just in case you're not aware of, "far more important issues to worry over" is usually much harder and more complex to gather consensus across stakeholders and passing this kind of minor legislations doesn't really have any impacts or delay there. This is more of "spare time" stuff.

This is just a highly visible problem. Bots make getting reservations at popular restaurants impossible for normal people. So they aren't necessarily being priced out they're being excluded by not being in the know. Which is frustrating. I'm in the know, thanks to my wife, and we still sometimes need to try for weeks to get a reservation because we refuse to pay on the black market.

It was probably hurting tourism.

The inverse of your question is "why not do this elsewhere too?"

Because these middlemen don't lead to record highs for investors

You have to start somewhere.

"Why fix anything if there are still other things broken"

Nothing shady about it. It's called "arbitrage".

Who are you responding to? Your comment is directly attached to the story post.

By taking up reservations that they may not sell, they make the problem worse and obscure what’s going on while costing restaurants business.

By extracting money from customers they people off of fine dining, which makes running restaurants harder.

Not a lot but every 0.1% matters in such a competitive industry.

I thought the way people got reservations was to pay the concierge.

One way or another, you're going to have to pay to get a reservation at a hot restaurant.

It's like under communism, where the price of bread was set by the state. The result was shortages. So the real "price" a customer would pay was how long they were willing to wait in line. Customers would then pay other people to stand in line for them.

It's not possible for government to legislate away the price.

What you do now is go eat at a different restaurant. Lots of good ones out there. I can't understand why any customer would be stupid enough to put up with that much hassle and expense just to eat at one particular popular restaurant.

And if you really like a restaurant enough to eat there all the time and become friendly with the staff then you can always get a reservation.

To be a blunt as possible here: Then you don't get to go.

I recognize that the particular demographic that this board attracts probably doesn't like that answer. But among the general public, I'd say it's an extremely popular answer - and "addressing a problem in the market" this way looks like yet another way to make society unfair and biased to the rich, and the average person absolutely hates it. Which is why this law will have broad popular support.