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Lyft, Uber throw Texas-sized tantrum over Austin driver law

captain_solo

I would at least respect them if they lobbied for the rules to be changed since the pile of regs on commercial driving are onerous, which is why taxi and limo drivers work for companies who can share the costs of insuring and maintaining a fleet. Uber (in a similar way that Netflix has done) has found a niche in a market where other people bear the burden of their business obligations which is what creates the large price gap between their services and those of the more traditional companies.

Eventually though, either they run into the same regs that their competition struggles with and the government realizes the loophole, or they run into market forces that force them into a more traditional operating model (this is happening to Netflix now in some ways - whatever your viewpoing on whether Netflix should have been sharing in the bandwidth costs of the common carriers - something now largely mitigated by peering and co-locating gear in their data centers - when they were driving 60% of the traffic, they were never realistically going to be able to keep doing that for free long term)

Don't get me wrong, I find the rules, regulations, and behavior of the larger traditional competitors in both the ride services and entertainment delivery (cable, ATT, etc) markets to be ridiculous and ripe for disruption, but those challenges are realities of the marketplace and any start-up would be wise to be very defensive and wise from day 1 about many of the regulatory and market risks they face. Ignoring them, and then whining when they begin to apply just doesn't cut it for me. We need to bring the law up to the behavior and realities of the marketplace, instead of just creating a new oligarchy of tech companies that are beholden to no one and are specially privileged by the governments regulatory model in a way that will eliminate their own up and coming competition. Don't want to get fooled again.

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