Exactly this. That's what I learned from Uber (and in some ways, AirBnB too) - from my initial excitement to the eventual realization that this is just investors and management making money on breaking laws and damaging the structure society. Disruption, they say.
You do realise the law making process is basically corrupted? It's called regulatory capture.
Most of the taxi laws are there to create scarcity, not protect the consumer.
Even with these laws, there are tons and tons abuses by legal taxi companies, but you don't hear about them.
The only real way to protect the consumers, is to allow the consumer to choose to use a service or not. If they want your custom, they better behave and sort there stuff out. It's the ultimate regulation. Government regulation forces you to use a particular service because you don't have much choice.
Creating laws just ends up with complicated rules, loopholes, and twisting the rules to a companies advantage.
You don't think French taxi drivers are burning cars, and rioting over safety of the consumer do you? There doing it because its breaking there self-interested monopoly.
What you described, though debatable on its own, has nothing to do with regulatory capture.
> Regulatory capture is a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure; it creates an opening for firms to behave in ways injurious to the public (e.g., producing negative externalities). The agencies are called "captured agencies".
Errm "instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating"
Incumbent Taxi companies have been lobbying regulation bodies for laws to stop competition for a long time. That's exactly what i'm talking about. They use excuses like "reducing congestion" etc when more taxi's actually reduces congestion.
This sounds exactly like regulatory capture. The taxi and limo commissions are doing exactly this.
Uber is taking advantage of a market that has been completely stifled by regulatory capture, allowing the incumbents to catastrophically under invest in personnel, systems and vehicles. These companies pillaged the industry with terrible services. Competition is going to bring them back to the table with far better service and pricing.
What about legitimate regulations that Uber skirts by drawing semantic distinctions? When an Uber driver refuses to make accommodations for riders with disabilities (as required by law in the US), Uber says, "sorry, not our driver -- we only serve as an intermediary." When Uber argues their drivers who meet the criteria of full time employees are just contractors to avoid all the complexities that entails, they are breaking the law (regardless of what the law "should be").
Uber riders (myself among them) are enjoying low fares paid for in an investor-fueled land-grab to capture some market share. The only question is whether their heavy-handed tactics will result in adequate market share to maintain the business profitably without incurring regulatory or consumer blowback. I would say so far that the answer is "yes".
I think there is a sustainable business model for Uber, but I don't think that Uber-in-5-years is going to be playing the same games that they're playing today.
Uber's big advantage is that they aren't taxis. They don't pick people up off the side of the road who are holding their hands up, or go in taxi queues at the airport.
There are good reasons for those services to be regulated the way they are; the consumer has much less choice and power.
Uber is in the car service model, where you call someone to come get you. (Taxis have been very big players in this market, so it's confusing, but their displacement here is very real and also very fair.)
Uber has gotten good enough that people very rarely need that first protected-and-regulated market any more.
But on the other hand, someone driving whole day, every day for Uber is an Uber employee, straight and simple. Yet uber refuses to treat them as employees, because it insists they are contractors. As the recent California ruling shows - they are not.
