This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law! Believe it or not, there were multiple ride hailing apps on the iPhone, but none were as great at accumulating capital or breaking the law without recourse.
The laws they allegedly broke were the taxi medallion cartel laws, which were the things keeping taxis terrible by limiting supply and competition. And those laws in general apply to the drivers rather than the ride hailing service. There is also a lot of ambiguity there, e.g. if you have a ride sharing service where people go on the app to find people to carpool with on a trip they'd be making anyway and then contribute gas money, is that a taxi service?
But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
The best thing to ever happen to corpo scum was that social media took over most of the news. Now there’s no trusted journalists to write a big article about this kind of stuff, instead folks just defend the corpo scum’s actions and spread lies for them, while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
It would have worked if we didn’t find out the hard way a lot of social media and alternative news outlets weren’t even scummier.
We need good journalism courses with heavy emphasis on ethics and the importance of journalism to democracy.
We also need a way to punish entertainment that passes as journalism (maybe fewer legal protections) and to incentive actual journalism (and find a decent way to distinguish between the two).
Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have any reason to do unless they were being targeted by a media campaign or captured government. There is also some dispute about whether some of those even happened or are just mischaracterizations from the media campaign.
It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.
Move the goalposts any more and they’re going to be outside the stadium. What laws matter to you? I agree there are shit laws but why can uber break them with impunity but individuals are jailed for smoking some fun lettuce?
The question you should be asking is, what do you want to do about it? Throw the people challenging the taxi cartels in prison, or get rid of the laws against fun lettuce?
Something else, I’m not sure what yet. Honestly, I’m not the best guy to ask but I know that I don’t want startups to continue breaking laws with impunity and I don’t want individuals to get imprisoned for stuff they do that isn’t affecting others in a meaningful way.
There isn't really a something else. You have bad laws that are in practice only enforced against the little guy. You could demand they also be enforced against the big guy, but that's hard to do when they're bad laws, isn't really a great outcome because they're bad laws, and its primary benefit would be in service of calling attention to the flaw so the bad laws can be repealed. And then maybe you should just start there to begin with.
Suppose that the status quo is the worst option, the second worst is enforcing the bad laws against the big guys, the best is getting rid of those laws.
Now, that might not be the case. Given the existence of bad laws, having someone who is able to break out of the bad cage might be better than if no one can, but let's consider what happens if we assume that it's worse.
Regardless of how they're ranked relative to each other, you would only pick either of the two worse options over the best if it was easier to do it. But getting bad laws enforced against well-heeled players is actually the hardest thing to do because they're doing something sympathetic and have the resources to fight, which is harder to do than repealing the bad laws.
I don't agree. Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in general against well-heeled players is a good thing. We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
(I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws. Yes, some of the laws that big players break are bad; some are fine. I'm not just talking about Uber here.)
> Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in general against well-heeled players is a good thing.
Whether something is good independent of what it takes to achieve it is a separate question from whether that's where you should focus your efforts.
> We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
Which is exactly why it's so hard to do it. The status quo is: Pass lots of laws that make everything illegal so that anyone without resources can be brought up on charges if they ruffle the wrong feathers. If you wanted to actually enforce all of those laws, they would immediately have to be repealed or everyone would be in jail. Which isn't in the interests of the people who want to keep them on the books to use for selective enforcement, so they don't enforce them that way in order to keep them on the books.
The consequence is that it takes even more political capital to have those laws rigorously enforced than to have them repealed, because then you have to fight both the big guys who don't want short-term enforcement against themselves and the autocrats who don't want to long-term have the laws repealed, instead of only the latter.
> I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws.
When laws are enforced against the little guys but not the big guys, it's usually because they're bad laws, because letting the rich openly get away with literal murder is highly unpopular.
The most significant category of good laws that big companies regularly violate with impunity is antitrust laws, but those also don't often get enforced against the little guy because the little guy isn't even in a position to violate them.
So I get your argument, but by that logic the only bad laws that get repealed will be those that affect big business, and the laws against individuals without resources will still be in place. I think we all agree that it’s unfair there’s a very large difference in enforcement of law between those with resources and those without, but I think to prevent that we need to figure out how to prevent the capture of the government by those with large resources. I could agree in concept that less laws are better for that overall, but also then there’s the question of who benefits from less laws and I bet those with resources will still benefit.
It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
> So I get your argument, but by that logic the only bad laws that get repealed will be those that affect big business, and the laws against individuals without resources will still be in place.
Quite the opposite.
You have a bad law which is only enforced against the little guy. Right now, when it's not enforced against the big guy, stories are written about it to get people riled up, but that's the wrong target.
Right now, when those laws are enforced against the little guy, people say "well they broke the law". Which is true, because everyone is breaking the law all the time, because there are so many bad laws. So what should be happening is, every time they try to enforce a bad law against the little guy, that should be the thing that gets people ruled up -- even if they're guilty. Because everyone is guilty, because the laws are crazy. So get people worked up about that so that the laws can be changed. Don't accept that people guilty of violating bad laws deserve to be punished. Drag the prosecutors through the mud. Flood the legislators with complaints whenever it happens. Use jury nullification and publicize to everyone that it's their right. Get those laws repealed.
> I think to prevent that we need to figure out how to prevent the capture of the government by those with large resources.
This was supposed to be checks and balances and limited government. As soon as you unchain legislators to micromanage the economy, anyone who captures them can shape the law to their advantage and then become rich and use the money to make sure the government stays captured.
The government needs to be constrained from making laws that inhibit competition.
> It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
The words you're looking for are "antitrust enforcement".
> It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
Heh, yeah, I was going to post to add this as well. That is the underlying problem. I don't necessarily think it has to mean "workers owning the means of production" per se, more like "the richest person's wealth cannot be more than X times the poorest" and "the largest participant in a market cannot have more than Y% market share", but the idea is similar. :-)
Why isn't at least one of those things actually addressing (disbanding, regulating, whatever--left to people experienced in policy or with context to have some remediation plan) those taxi cartels' behavior?
The argument is that getting rid of the bad laws is better than enforcing them more rigorously. This can be applied to the laws propping up the taxi medallion cartels as well as the ones prohibiting personal drug use. Then anyone (not just Uber) could compete with them and thereby disband the taxi cartels previously using those laws to constrain competition.
I agree that removing bad laws is good. I think by introducing the second, culturally charged topic (1.) taxi cartels, 2.) recreational drugs) you diminish the possible interpretations of your perspective.
The other downstream conclusions make sense too, but the linkage is more opaque making it difficult to appreciate.
Also hard to acknowledge is--who decides which laws are "bad"? Generally, societal outcomes should test the efficacy (toward some comparably abstract societal good) of laws, which then prompts the legislature to do something between patting themselves on the back and authoring actually effective law.
It's better to ask the question in a different way. We know what bad laws are. They're laws that benefit some interest group at the expense of the general public, e.g. by constraining competition or diverting tax dollars to cronies.
So the question is, how do you eliminate bad laws? This isn't a question of what a hypothetical legislature should do if it was full of good faith actors, it's a question of how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public so that they're inhibited from passing bad laws.
That makes sense but seems like it would only actually be a subset of bad laws. I mainly mean to highlight that it's not a comprehensive way to identify bad law.
> how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public
This seems like a critical nuance that, like you said, needs a structural solution. I have no actual idea, but conceptually this seems like it would eliminate a subset of particularly bad laws and actions (e.g. members of the legislature trading on their insider information) which have outsized, negative outcomes for the public. But we also rely on that very rule making body to essentially self-govern. And such a grass-roots movement of reforms to put the public first seem unlikely given the attitudes and sensationalizing behaviors present in the members of that body.
I avoid politics because of just how disaffecting it is to think about most of these details.
Because more money and special interests are behind fun lettuce smoking enforcement than local taxi companies could put behind protecting their own cartel from interlopers. If the taxi companies had more money to dump on politicians than is poured into drug enforcement, then the priorities would have changed.
Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that was publicly queryable, subject to FOIA laws and generally had easy to search public databases for them, with detailed notes. Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
Sure, Medallion laws had problems, and got Regulatory Captured in some cities to also become terrible Trusts controlling prices that needed busting. But the answer to "fix the Regulation" isn't always "break the Regulation", and the Regulation had a lot of good intent of having public accessible information about drivers and that data not just owned by a single company and locked in their opaque algorithms. It might have been nicer to fix the Regulatory Capture and Bust the Trusts.
> Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that was publicly queryable, subject to FOIA laws and generally had easy to search public databases for them, with detailed notes.
You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
> Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
> You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions. The medallion itself is the primary "this person is a reputable cab driver". That's also entirely why the Regulatory Capture in some cities was so effective in controlling supply of medallions, because it was city police enforced.
Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
Today a few cities have updated that external paint requirement (and inside the car medallion papers) to include QR codes for even quicker lookup on modern phones or to even use an app to do nice things like pay for the Taxi without needing to broker/negotiate it. Those kind of technological improvements have kind of gotten lost in the wash of the speed of which Uber/Lyft moved fast and broke things, but were always possible.
> So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be. I never said anything about banning Uber/Lyft. Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem. I said that Uber/Lyft should have been required to do the same or similar paperwork that medallions represent, that both of their data should be open under the previously existing laws, as a public good. Break the artificial scarcity, sure, give Uber/Lyft a license to "print medallions" if that breaks existing Trusts. But get that data open and available to the public (and enforceable by the public's law enforcement). Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations. That's what regulations are for, the public good that competition doesn't care about/can't care about/needs to keep "secret sauce" for advantages.
Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
Sometimes laws do more harm than good (by limiting supply and slowing innovation) and it requires creatively skirting regulations.
Things were always possible to improve the taxi industry. Smartphones had been around a few years. But it would've taken the industry 20 years to implement it correctly. In the same way that rampant music and movie piracy in the early 2000s hastened the development of iTunes and Netflix's subscription model way of doing business.
Uber shows the driver's name, their photo, and has a process for flagging drivers. Public safety is important to their business. As someone who's driven an Uber and Lyft and been through their process, I've seen it firsthand.
It's not like "medallions" worked - I remember driving in multiple taxis in pre 2010 days where the photo DID NOT MATCH UP to the driver. My high school physics teacher who grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1970s told stories about how he learned how to drive by illegally working and driving taxis around as a 15 year old.
Right now, we're just going through the same thing with AI again, and Silicon Valley is applying it's ethos of the past few decades.
There are reasons why in various industries, China is "winning the race", so to speak.
Regulations exist, but sometimes people who creatively ignore the "regulations" can win the tide of the public. It's one of America's best (and incredibly divisive) cultural capabilities.
> Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
My experience was very different and "almost all" doesn't feel correct. It's certainly fun hyperbole. NYC the systems worked more than they didn't. In part because of spot lights from famous TV shows and 70s corruption documentaries/news exposes. Most smaller cities the taxis quietly worked with little corruption and a lot of trustworthiness. In the early oughts I had good experiences hailing cabs in cities a lot smaller than NYC that people didn't believe you could even hail cabs in.
Because Taxi regulations were so wildly different from cities, it's hard to generalize what the experience used to be. It varied a lot from city to city and was a massive spectrum, with a few national certainties like some of the big Franchises to help smooth things a bit.
> I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
In the early oughts, a few cities like Seattle were pressuring the big national Franchise companies like Yellow Cab through a mixture of regulatory body pressure (but not actual laws) and bottom up consumer messaging/volume customer requirements to move to "Computer Dispatch". There was a growing competition in that space, and a bunch of innovation happening between the competitors, including some of the things Uber and Lyft take credit for today because Yellow Cab mostly broke apart in the onslaught of VC subsidization and rule breaking.
I don't think it would have taken "20 years" to implement it "correctly". We don't know because the whole thing got disrupted so sideways by the gig economy. (Which also really didn't care about making the taxi business better, but about making the labor market worse. We should also not forget that breaking the worst parts of taxi medallion laws also broke the good ones that helped build useful labor-side things like taxi driver unions and paid for things like healthcare.)
All I'm saying is that there was a path that this could have all been done under the old regulations, legally. It's a path not taken here, and probably to our detriment. Though I can't prove that just as much as you can't prove that innovations like smarter apps would have taken "20 years" in that other timeline.
> If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions.
Well that's not going to work. You now have people from outside the jurisdiction having a government they didn't elect cast in the role of their protectors. Instead what happens is the local government protects the incumbents, which is what we've seen in practice.
> Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
As opposed to the license plates already on all cars?
> The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be.
People keep trying to regard Uber as a taxi company. They keep claiming to be an app, because... they are. So replace the app with an open source one. Create an independent non-profit to handle payments and maintain a server to hold the driver ratings and take a small cut of the payments to cover its costs. Operate it as a live auction where drivers list how much they'll charge per mile and riders pick a driver based on their rating and price. Publish all the data.
If you do it well, people will use it voluntarily. If you do it poorly, you haven't demonstrated enough competence to be trusted making regulations that people would have to follow even if they're dumb.
> Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem.
The problem is that incumbents call the things they use to destroy competition "public safety regulations".
> Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations.
Not when you can "coerce" them through competition. If people like the ratings system which is more open or the one that extracts lower margins and the app is otherwise fungible with theirs, they don't even exist unless they can be better than the competing system you created to do better, which implies that you failed to actually do better and then they're supposed to win. Which in turn applies pressure on the public system to do better itself, instead of getting captured, because if it gets captured then it becomes uncompetitive and actually has competition.
The only alternative I remember is "black car" services, eg airport limos and the like. But there was very little automation around it; you had to speak on the phone with someone to book, and it was always like 24+ hours out rather than "go to the place now" the way a cab is.
Most taxi services will send a car to your address immediately, no reservation required. Problem is, you have to know the exact address where you want to be picked up, which can sometimes be difficult to determine if you're new in town and/or standing on a street with no obvious sign or address, e.g. on the edge of a large university campus. That's where GPS-driven apps really shine, plus the ability to see the car's ___location in near real-time, and why I will never be sad at the demise of traditional way of having to call a cab.
Indeed, but I was referring specifically to the charge that taxi alternatives (eg, outside the medallion system) existed pre-Uber. And I think, they did, but only in very limited use cases like airport shuttles, and not with fleets anywhere near large enough to have a car five minutes from anywhere at all times— hence the need to book those things ahead.
