24. Free Delivery Is Not Free: Chicken, Apps, and Digital Landlords

According to many sports-odds sites, South Korea has around a 70~80% chance of making it into the Round of 32 in the World Cup. If that happens, we will get to watch another game, and many families in Korea will probably do something very familiar: order chicken.

Your parents open a delivery app, and the screen flashes the magic words:

FREE DELIVERY.

Nice, right? But here is the question: if delivery is free, who is paying for the rider, the app, the discount, and the restaurant’s lost profit?

Recently, Coupang Eats and Baedal Minjok are fighting what some people call a “free delivery war.” To customers, this looks like a gift. To many restaurant owners, it feels more like a trap. Behind every “free” delivery promotion, there may be hidden costs, platform fees, lower profits, and a bigger question about who really controls Korea’s food market.

Welcome to the age of technofeudalism.

What is Technofeudalism?

The word sounds complicated, but the idea is simple.

In medieval feudalism, powerful lords owned land. Peasants, or serfs, worked on that land. They did not own the land themselves, so they had to give part of what they produced to the lord.

Today, most of us do not live under medieval lords. But some economists argue that a similar system is returning in digital form.

Instead of land, the new “territory” is the platform.

App stores, delivery apps, shopping apps, search engines, video platforms, and social media platforms do not simply sell products. They control the space where other people sell, search, advertise, review, and compete.

In other words, the platform becomes the place where the market happens.

Capitalism vs. Technofeudalism

In capitalism, businesses usually make products or provide services, then compete in the market. A chicken restaurant might succeed because its food tastes better, its price is fair, or its service is good.

But in the platform economy, success can also depend on the app.

• Which restaurant appears first?

• Which restaurant gets promoted?

• Which store gets more reviews?

• Which menu gets shown to hungry customers?

• Which seller has to pay more just to be noticed?

This is where Yanis Varoufakis, an economist and writer, introduces the idea of technofeudalism. He argues that some big tech platforms now act less like normal businesses and more like digital landlords.

They do not own the chicken shop, but they may control the road customers use to reach it, and that “road” is the platform.

How Does This Affect You?

Every time you order food through Coupang Eats or Baedal Minjok or buy something from an online platform, you’re participating in this system. The shop owners on these platforms don’t just sell their products—they are paying rent to the platform in the form of commission fees. For instance, for a 25,000 KRW chicken, restaurants may lose around 6,000 KRW just to cover these fees​

This is why you’ve likely noticed price increases in your favorite chicken meals. With some predicting that a single chicken could soon cost 30,000 to 40,000 KRW​, it’s clear that the platform's high fees are forcing restaurants to either raise prices or stop using the delivery services altogether.

From Markets to Platforms

In the age of capitalism, markets were supposed to be places where anyone could trade freely. But now, digital platforms have taken over. Instead of open competition, these platforms have all the power. They decide which businesses succeed and which don’t.

For instance, if Baedal Minjok decides to promote certain restaurants over others, those businesses might get more customers simply because of that promotion—not necessarily because they offer better food or service.

This means markets are no longer truly free. They’ve been replaced by digital platforms that control the flow of products and services, just like how medieval lords controlled the land and who could work on it.

Are We the New Serfs?

Technofeudalism does not only affect restaurants. It also affects users.

Every time we search, click, order, scroll, like, review, or watch, we give platforms information about our behavior. The platform learns what we want, what we ignore, what makes us spend money, and what keeps us coming back.

That data helps the platform become smarter.

So even when an app feels free, we may still be paying with attention, behavior, and personal information.

This does not mean every app is evil. Delivery apps are useful. They save time, help customers discover restaurants, and make modern life more convenient.

The real question is different:

What happens when a useful app becomes so powerful that restaurants, riders, and customers cannot easily leave it?

What Can We Do?

Yanis Varoufakis offers some ideas on how we can move forward. One suggestion is to ban free services from big tech companies. Wait, what? Why would we want to stop using free services?

The point is that these services aren’t really free; we’re paying with our data, and that data is being used to manipulate our behavior. Instead of giving away our data, maybe we should pay a small fee for using these platforms and protect our personal information from being exploited.

Conclusion

The chicken you order during the next World Cup match (fingers crossed) may seem like a simple dinner. But it can also reveal something much bigger about the modern economy.

In the past, power came from owning land.

Later, power came from owning factories.

Now, power may come from owning platforms, data, algorithms, and access to customers.

So the next time an app says FREE DELIVERY, do not just ask, “What should I eat?”

Ask one more question: Free for whom?

Homework

After reading the blog post, think about the role of digital platforms in today’s economy. In the comments section, write a short paragraph answering to one of the options below:

Option 1

Option 2: Platform Fee Investigation

Examples: Steam, Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Patreon, YouTube Super Chat, YouTube Music, Melon, Roblox, Amazon, Coupang, Coupang Eats, Yogiyo, Baedal Minjok, Fiverr, Kmong, Temu, AliExpress, Naver Store, and more.

FYI: Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney+ are not the best examples for this assignment because movie production teams do not pay a direct commission fee just to upload their movies to those platforms.

After posting your paragraph, read at least one other student’s comment and briefly reply to it.

Sample Answer: Option 2

I chose Melon Music (www.melon.com), which is one of the biggest music streaming platforms in South Korea. Currently, Melon Music takes a 35% commission fee from streams and downloads of songs uploaded by music producers or music labels. In addition, the record label or distributor may take approximately 24% of the revenue, leaving the singer-songwriter with only about a 16% cut. I believe this structure is unfair to artists, as they are the ones who create the final product through their creativity and effort, yet they receive only a small fraction of the total revenue.