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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away. This seems to be a resounding success. But it was very much organized crime? If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail. In fact he was involved in so much other generally shady stuff that he was forced out. Yet he definitely moved the needle.

Disagree here. It's not fraud. They just exploited one glaring huge loophole in every law that lawmakers ignore it so often that the only reason I could think of it is purposeful. The loophole is - quantity has quality of it's own.

Think of it that way - driving people has always been legal. Carpooling is also universally legal. Being reimbursed on expenses that you incur while helping people is also legal. Posting a message on your condo message board - I am working here, so I can drive back and forth 3 people every day to this point in the morning and evening is once again legal. It is also legal if a friend calls you with - my girlfriend is here, she needs someone to pick her up at the airport, and leave her at my apartment, and I am out of town. Now come Uber - the ever helping carebears - they just provide a software that makes coordination and communication easy, and they just help people with the reimbursements. They are not a taxi company. They are saving the planet by increasing carpooling. Think of the trees. And the saved CO2. And if you have good and expensive lawyers they can explain for a long long time the stark differences between them and the taxi companies. Same with airbnb. They take some informal behavior and turn it up to 11.

The loophole doesn't work. In cities where only taxis can offer rides for hire (including San Francisco at the time Uber started), Uber is an unlicensed taxi, and therefore illegal. Every city that has litigated this point has won, and driven Uber out. The exception is the one that matters - in San Francisco, where it all started, Uber were able to delay for long enough to build up sufficient lobbying power that they could get the California legislature to change the law before the case got to trial.

In cities where pre-booked livery cars (AmE)/minicabs (BrE) are legal, Uber has generally ended up complying with the laws and operating a licensed minicab service.

Giving your congressman money is legal. Having your congressman vote on a bill is legal. Giving your congressman money so that he will vote a particular way on a bill is illegal.

This is an interesting way of seeing it. I can think of a lot of regulated activities that can simply be broken down into a series of unregulated activities. Does this ever win in court, or do judges always slap it down with something like "don't try to be cute; the greater picture is obviously that you ran an unregulated taxi"?

*EDIT: I guess this is probably why legal systems rely so much on subjective human judgement rather than applying purely mechanistic rules, as the latter would be tricked by breaking down a regulated activity into a series of unregulated ones, but humans would probably just see what happened for what it is.

The Uber thing isn’t even as clever as you’re describing. At least in New York the rule was you couldn’t do flag stops unless you were a “taxi.” But you could always call someone and arrange a pickup. Uber is that with an app instead of a catchy commercial and a memorable phone number.

There are additional rules for livery car services beyond the requirement to book in advance - notably that people driving commercially should have commercial insurance. My understanding was that Uber initially ignored these rules in NYC but eventually ended up complying.

London was a slightly unusual case in that our minicab law was sufficiently flexible that Uber decided to comply from day 1. For the same reason, there was a healthy ecosystem of minicab apps before Uber arrived. Uber outcompeted them on price and convenience by being willing to lose money hand-over-fist. Now that Uber are making a (tiny) operating profit, they have the same prices as traditional minicab firms.

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