In the past (pre-Uber), if you made this amount of money by engaging in large-scale, coordinated law breaking, you were called a gangster and got a big old nice RICO charge.
Don't be confused or blinded by the valuation. That is a byproduct of breaking the rules. The rules were not broken because they were unfair - that's a meme - you don't get to pass arbitrary judgement of which laws you do and do not respect (in theory). As a business, if you do not like the legal environment (rules) of a certain location, the logical (and respectable) choice is to not operate in that region/location.
My view is 10x more harsh on companies breaking the law in a coordinated manner than compared to an individual person.
Thank goodness it was only in theory. The taxi industry was and is terrible, the only thing propping it up is regulatory capture.
> As a business, if you do not like the legal environment (rules) of a certain location, the logical (and respectable) choice is to not operate in that region/location.
As a consumer, I'm glad that the rules were systematically broken in a way that benefitted everyone except the taxi industry.
I can definitely get aboard the taxi hate train, but do bear in mind that there has been a higher incident of sexual assaults tied to uber drivers over taxi drivers - it's not a free win for everyone, they broke both rules intended for regulatory capture and those intended for public safety.
These are good times for the consumer, but of course the situation won't be this way forever.
Ridesharing is more convenient, safer, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly. There's less idling, less aimless driving, less congestion, more carpooling, no clumsy exchange of cash or credit cards, the reputation of drivers is visible, and the ride is fully tracked so your whereabouts are known.
This is really problematic for me. If you restrict the scope rightly to only democracies that are truly representative (which many regulatory capture environments are not) I might be able to agree. But many governments in the world are not nearly legitimate enough to deserve this respect.
I have no issue with individuals, businesses, revolutionaries and other for profit or not for profit companies trying to undermine the dictates, decrees, laws or rules or whatever you want to call them of oppressive or authoritarian governments.
Taken to a logical extreme, this justifies for profit companies supporting and entrenching dictatorships, under the excuse of “we were just following the law”.
Laws are the social contract that we've all agreed to - I am totally in agreement that a lot of laws were created through corrupt government action, but giving free reign to any private entity to ignore laws they find onerous pretty much removes lawful society.
Even then I cannot. The majority can be wrong at times and a bad law, even one with majority support, is a bad law. In such cases the only value to following such a law is to reduce risk of enforcement (and there is plenty enough evidence that following the law is no defense against being harmed by those who enforce the law).
I am sure you can dig up illegal acts, but the secret sauce was the new dynamic that bent what people thought was possible at scale.
I'm thinking this isn't actually true. In some cases you definitely were. In others, you become the dominant player and enjoyed becoming wealthy.
What exactly divided the former from the latter? I wish I understood that better.
I'd say that's firmly on the "breaking the law" side of things.
I think most people consider onerous regulations to construct a barrier against entry aimed at any new market entrants[1] to be a different sort of law breaking than normal law breaking (more... morally and ethically acceptable). IMO Uber has flagrantly ignored a number of regulations regarding driver background checks that have allowed it to become less than safe to ride in, especially for single women, there have been a plethora of stories about women being stalked by uber drivers - even within the water-cooler talk at my office.
So technically they've broken a bunch of laws - and ethically they've acted in bad faith.
1. Please note, I think what regulations would be in this group varies extremely across HN, with the more freebretarian folks placing all regulations here, while others may consider labour regulations or environmental regulations to provide real value - and I really don't want to get into this discussion, I just think we can all mentally place a line _somewhere_
Regulations are enforced by regulatory bodies that operate under a different legal basis than civil / criminal law. Regulatory bodies are not legislative in nature but rather executive. Being sanctioned by a regulatory body is a very different thing than getting prosecuted.
For one, a regulatory body does not enjoy legitimate use of force, and cannot imprison individuals. They can only sanction according to their mandate. If you refuse to pay a sanction, this may escalate to a prosecutable criminal infraction. But simply breaking regs isn't a crime.
For instance, if you're operating an illegal home-based business, you may be subject to sanction by the zoning authority and the entity that you were supposed to register with. Like the local real estate board if you were providing realtor services without a license.
Only in rare situations is it a criminal offense to provide commercial services without the proper licenses, such as providing legal or medical services. It is not, as you say, the norm.
Even in the case of environmental regulations, rarely are they elevated to the status of crimes under criminal law. More usually you'll get contacted by the appropriate environmental protection administration and fined. I recall hearing about one company who would simply call up the authorities whenever they needed to dump into the river and pay the token fine.
There's a lot of room for improvement.
