Re: They need to hit Uber hard, and where it hurts, in the wallet
The issue seems to be that they don't think they really /are/ regulated -- not if that means "doing what the regulators and legislators say you must do". This is the big problem with regulation of all sorts - it's all very well having a big book (or books) of rules, but how'd you check whether the rules are having the desired effect? How'd you know people are obeying them? If you ARE lucky enough to catch someone flouting them, are the penalties commensurate with the harms suffered? It's the same from hardcore financial trading to retail banks to normal company accounts to the actions of the Big Four consultancies. It's there in infosec and in fire safety, as seen in W11 a few months ago (have a look online for the datasheets for ReynoBond PE, the cladding from Grenfell Tower that went up like a Victorian nightdress -- see all those fire safety certifications from around the world?) It turns up in healthcare and education, too, it's not a purely private sector problem. Come to that, it turns up in the context of government, law enforcement and the Intel Community, too.
No, I don''t have a strong opinion on the answer. "spend more on monitoring compliance and make the penalties for wilful flouting include disbarring Directors and *real* fines" sounds good, but where do those regulators come from? As with the FCA monitoring of financial trading, they have to employ people who know the business inside out and who know the tricks and sleight-of-hands, which means you have to pay 'em Desk Head or MD level salaries - and those are pretty chunky; you won't get many takers for less than £250k. Not until the next massive round of redundo, anyway... OK infosec people are much cheaper than that, but here the problem is that even if you paid them a million quid a year, there simply aren't enough good experienced professionals to go round. You'd end up hiring half the security people in the country, leaving no-one to actually secure the regualated organisations·
And so on and so forth.
. (I only just discovered the much heralded GDPR fines, originally 5% of turnover but now down to 4%, are capped at £18m. Uber turned over $6.5Bn last year. You can bet a $260m fine would get Uber's attention, and that £18m will be lost under "misc. operating expenses, stationary, sundries" in next years Annual Report. So scrapping the cap would be a good start. We need to put a few firms out of business.)
Shouty icon, because who doesn't feel better after an hour or so's bulgy-eyed bellowing about the inequity of it all?