Hi, we’re a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We’re not a newspaper, we’re a content portal.
We’re not a taxi service, we’re a ride sharing app.
We’re not a pay TV service, we’re a streaming platform.
We’re not a department store, we’re an e-commerce marketplace.
We’re not a financial services firm, we’re crypto.
We’re not a space agency, we’re a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We’re not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we’re a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we’re totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don’t apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections… They totally don’t apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we’re talking about everyone else’s intellectual property.
We’re going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We’ve also raised several billion in VC funding, and we’ll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we’ll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won’t believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we’re doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don’t forget to check out our latest innovation. It’s the Uber of toothpaste!
@ajsadauskas @technology One factual point I’m not clear on–how exactly are Lyft/Uber getting away with operating unlicensed taxi services? Are they just ignoring the law but getting away with it because city governments are tech-enthralled? (But could, theoretically, bust every uber driver for operating a taxi without a license)? Or do they actually have some legal basis for not needing medallions?
It totally depends of the jurisdiction. In some parts of the world calling up a ride sharing app with get you a totally normal taxi at normal metered taxi rates. In other parts of the world its pretty much they do it and nobody can stop them. A private citizen can pick up anyone they want and the laws all assumed that a taxi would have to find passengers and handle money in person. By the time politicians get around to doing anything about it they’ve already taken over the market and voters would take it personally if they had to go back to regular cabs.
Because people don’t hail them on the street when they’re passing, they’re not legally a taxi service.
So they don’t need medalions, cab licenses or whatever the system is in that country and, more importantly, don’t need to obbey the rules for taxi services both for the vehicle (most noteable the rules about the colors of the vehicle and in some countries even the kind of vehicle itself), clear transparent predictable upfront pricing, and for the actual cabbies (for example, in London they don’t need to have “The Knowledge” - which is basically having memorized all the streets - which cabbies do have to have before they get a license or obbey any of the other legal requirements for licensing of the actual drivers that cabbies have) so operation is much cheaper.
From what I’ve seen they’re generally operating under the local legislation of “rental driver cars” (i.e. cars rented with a driver) and the arrangement of getting, for example a Uber via their app, is treated in legal terms as a booking not as a hailing, even though it is pretty close in de facto terms to hailing a cab.
It took a decade for states to catch up on this loophole into providing the same service as a taxi services whilst not legally being one (as they’re not hailed, they’re “hired”) made possible by smartphone technology, and by the time they did Uber and similar were so big that most (like Portugal, as mentioned by somebody else) just made those low-regulation quasi-cab services legal without converging the regulations for taxis with theirs (i.e. they simply legalized the competitive advantages that services like Uber got by finding a loophole in the law), and said legalizing of the much (much, MUCH) lower regulatory requirements on them whilst kepting taxi services high-regulation, maintained the uneven market playing field that had allowed the explosive growth of Uber and its ilk.
People don’t hail actual licensed taxis on the street in NYC anymore either. I tried when I was there and the taxi drivers said I needed to schedule with the app. The exception was the taxi stations, where you got in line and waited for your ticket to give to the cabbie.
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Portugal has the Uber law, all drivers have to be clearly indicated with a TVDE sticker and they need some basic qualification afaik. Also some taxi services double dip of course.