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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

If your points #1 and #2 were in isolation, that would be fine. But the issue at hand is that those fares are justified by a evidence-based pricing policy, and the evidence in question are facts that Uber knows to be wrong.

If I'm a trader in the highly volatile Celery Stalk market, and I sign a contract with a restaurant that I'll sell them celery at a 5% markup over what I'm paying, and I actually take 7%, that's not "free trade", it's fraud.

Now I don't know exactly what the details of Uber's pricing calculations are. So maybe it's not quite like celery skimming. But it sounds close enough, and is probably worth a law suit to find out.

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I see your point and understand why what Uber is doing feels kind of icky.

I don't see it as fraud, because I don't think Uber's up-front pricing is them saying "this is the best deal for you, the customer", but rather an offer to the customer to buy a product at that price. They don't have any fiduciary duty to give the customer the "best rate."

This feels like the trend now of people realizing that bank tellers aren't actually fiduciaries and getting upset when they—i.e. customers—are sold financial products that might not be necessary or in their best interest. Matt Levine has a section on this[0] (skip to the section on "cross-selling") and why people are upset.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-13/spoofing-...

> They don't have any fiduciary duty to give the customer the "best rate."

This, to me, is the critical point from the rider side.

If drivers were ever told something along the lines of "We, Uber, take an x% cut of the fare" then I can see a court deciding that drivers were defrauded by Uber when they misrepresented what the user paid.

Yes, and I seem to have been wrong about their relationship. @abduhl pointed out that their agreement with drivers does say that they merely take a % of fares.[0] That agreement, though, seems to have been before the implementation of upfront pricing, so I don't know if the Technology Services Agreement had been modified.

[0] Page 4, sub-section (16) of the court documents https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/uberdrver...

Yeah, okay. If A) that's true and B) Users paid a different amount than what Uber indicates to drivers was paid, it seems like drivers have an excellent case against Uber.

In which case we'll see Uber, a company that seems set on self-destruction at this point, pay a moderate settlement that's unlikely to be material compared to their funding.

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