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I agree with the commentators that dispute calling Uber a fraud. Further, you also gloss over just how much of a legal grey area they operating in when they started. New York City is famous for its highly restricted taxi licensing, but even there you've always had the ability to schedule a pre-arranged ride through private livery drivers. This was referred to as "black car service" because the market tended to favor high-end vehicles driven by dressed-up chauffeurs. The big advantage for a taxi license was the ability to pick up customers through street hails or cabstands, and so there wasn't much of a conflict or overlap between the two markets. They existed more-or-less in harmony for decades because "calling ahead" was too much of a pain in the ass and too bougie to be a threat to the taxi industry.
Obviously that changed with smartphones. Suddenly the ability to "call a car" became way way easier, and taxis had the right to worry but they couldn't do shit about it. The regulations that allowed pre-arranged rides existed for decades did not have a "unless pre-arranging gets too easy!" clause. On top of that, Uber's business model had additional layers of protection because of their defense of "We don't own or operate any 'taxis' that's crazy, we just connect you with 'drivers' who will take you places". Taxi companies desperately tried to sue Uber for numerous violations, but they lost every single lawsuit.
In pretty much every jurisdiction in the world there are rules on what you need to do to drive a car for hire and Uber frequently did not require drivers to follow every jurisdiction's rules to start driving. These jurisdictions had the option to shut Uber down for this but they either couldn't get their shit together, they looked the other way, or they did and it became a constant political issue they had to balance against how mad local taxi companies were.
In my town Uber was warned to stop or comply, they ignored the warning, the town fined them, and then Uber disappeared from town. Then the town council got shit for it for years before they changed taxi laws. Uber did some form of this everywhere. As much as I appreciate Uber and love the future we live in, this is a blatantly criminally minded business plan!
You're right, that did happen in some places. I was pushing back on the idea that it was the primary business plan, by highlighting what the law actually was in major cities when they entered the scene.
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In Korea, Uber was kicked out of the entire country, and only foreigners complained, because domestic app companies worked with taxi companies to come up with non-shitty ride hailing services of their own. I think they might have a Korean service now, having miraculously discovered how to work within the confines of existing taxi regulations.
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