Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomblomfield | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the Mayor of London or TfL really expect to shut down Uber. It would be a deeply unpopular move. There's an acceptance that Uber has improved things for riders, albeit at the expense of the Black Cab industry, and London wants to welcome innovative technology firms.

However, I also suspect that Uber hasn't been as co-operative as TfL would like on several issues mentioned, and so this feels like a warning shot to get them to be better corporate citizen. Quote from an MP; "No company, however big and powerful, will be allowed to flout our laws and regulations."

Uber could have reacted by saying "we acknowledge our shortfallings, and we'll work closely with TfL and the Mayor of London to ensure we put passenger safety first. We hope to avoid any interruption in service and continue to play a valuable part in London's diverse and effective public transportation system."

Instead, they took a typically Travis-ish stance and said "Screw you, people love us because we're cheaper, we'll fight this and we'll win," without any acknowledgment of their failings.

Perhaps new leadership can change this approach.

View on HN

They already had a warning shot four months ago, when their license renewal was denied in favour of a temporary renewal for four months. This one is the next step in the process.

Uber isn't magic - if there's pent-up demand for a company that fills Uber's boots, one will pop up. The issues TfL have with Uber aren't to do with the service they provide, it's failing to comply with TfL's administrative requirements. You could easily build a company that does what Uber does in London without the hate for local Government that is ingrained into Uber's culture - and there already are a number of minicab companies that do what Uber does, just minus quite as fancy an app.

There have been few companies that have tried. Some mentioned in thread. They all had trouble working with tfl.

One company licenced their software with an existing cab company in order to work with them. TFL started an investigation and unlicensed the previously legally licenced private taxi company for no stated reason.

Make no mistake they are activity hostile against innovation that could make taxi travel cheaper and faster.

https://blog.taxify.eu/2017/09/bringing-fairer-ride-hailing-...

I suspect anyone who looks like they could be the next uber would simply be shutdown.

Reading Taxify's side of the story alone reveals significant bias, and even that seems to suggest that what happened is that Taxify bought an existing company for its minicab license - which is practically bound to be a problem.

Why couldn't they find a customer to sell their product to without acquiring that customer?

The problem wasn't the app - it was the company bypassing the licensing process.

Interestingly, their link suggesting that hundreds of private hire operators are in the process of being reviewed does not say what they think it says, and does not in fact contain any statistics for private hire operators being reviewed.

Buying a company that owns an asset or holds a license is a reasonable way to obtain said asset or license. Nothing wrong with that.

If you're talking about a license in the sense of a right, like a copyright or patent license, or a license to drill for oil somewhere, then yes. But this is a license in the sense of regulatory approval of a specific organisation, which is not something it's proper to buy and sell. You can't buy someone's driving license, gun license, medical license, license, etc.

It's common in many parts of the US to buy a liquor license from an existing establishment.

And generally there is a process that needs to be followed as well--public posting, public comment, etc. Any changes like operating hours, operating address, etc. means you have to go back to your council/commission.

Liquor licenses rarely just transfer unless you bought the whole business and didn't actually change a thing.

In the insurance field "acqui-license" deals, like "acqui-hire" in tech, are not impossible or even necessarily discouraged. Every US state has its own set of regulations for who can be issued a license to sell insurance, and usually it's easier from a bureaucracy perspective to maintain the license once you have it than it is to get a new one. So buying and selling of companies solely for their existing insurance licenses is a thing.

Sure, though The UK is another regulatory regime again.

Not sure the drivers license is a fair metaphor. That makes some sense: the government is saying this particular individual appears to be capable of driving. People change (thus the need for periodic renewals) but usually don’t change so dramatically that they can no longer drive.

But how does regulatory approval work with institutions? Institutions are ever changing, and like the ship of Theseus, eventually the original company will replace all of its employees, management, and even processes.

So what triggers a need for renewed regulatory approval? If the original company switches out 50% of its workforce it can keep its license, but if the owner changes suddenly the license is invalid. How does that make sense?

Typically, every year, or every X years, you undergo an audit, that verifies that your processes are still compliant.

Yes, the edge case of "Fire everyone and hire some other people" does not trigger re-licensing. Also, hardly anybody does this, in order to do anything other then downgrade employees to contractors, or union-bust. That's because 99% of the time, companies, even with a lot of turnover, don't change their business processes out of the blue.

99% of the time, when they are being acquired for their licenses, they do.

Suppose that you are running a company that stores PII, in order to... Generate credit reports that banks and car loan places can use to evaluate your credit-worthiness.

Suppose (Shockingly!) that you operate in a country with strict regulation about how you can store sensitive PII. Suppose that in order to operate your business, you need to be in compliance.

Your business processes have to pass regulator audits - you need to limit access to your data, you need to keep it encrypted while at rest, you need to take steps to prevent exfiltration...

Suppose that you're in compliance, you are licensed to operate with PII and life's great.

Now, suppose that another company, called FaxEqui buys you. They come in, institute all their own business processes, open up all customer data to interns, change all passwords to admin/admin, unencrypt your database, and have a direct link between your PII, and the internet. None of this is in compliance with the regulatory environment.

The regulator takes one look at this, and pulls their license. They FaxEqui then proceeds to write to anyone who will listen, to complain about how unfair it is that 'their' license was revoked.

The point of this licensing process is to audit and control a company's internal processes. Buying a company that has such a license does not magically bring your own internal processes into compliance.

For sure, a lot of the value proposition of Uber could be seamlessly be replaced by a different company. However one thing that Uber has that is totally proprietary to them is their global mindshare. For example, when I go to the US, I use the Uber app whenever I can, because it's the exact same experience as at home and I know what I'm going to get. For travellers, this continuity of experience is great.

Maybe so, but I didn't even bother using Uber in a country where all the guides recommended another app because it's more popular. Consumers aren't enterprise, they'll switch faster if they think they'll get a better deal.

I actively avoid Uber wherever I go because of that mind share and the negative connotations that it has. Not all news is good news.

> Uber isn't magic - if there's pent-up demand for a company that fills Uber's boots, one will pop up.

The thing is, until Uber popped up, that pent-up demand simply wasn't being satisfied. The taxi monopolies and regulators were quite happy with their rents (in the economic sense of rent-seeking), and consumers suffered from it (I suspect that Uber & Lyft have prevented thousands of drunken-driving deaths).

A lot of people give Uber's culture a lot of hate — but that corporate culture is what created a company which was able to satisfy millions of customers and save lives too. It's provided a colossal amount of economic value to the world (I also like to think that it's made visible the economic value the taxi monopolies & regulators have been invisibly destroying for decades).

> there already are a number of minicab companies that do what Uber does, just minus quite as fancy an app.

I think that app is the keystone of the whole experience. I can, anywhere I am, open that app and a car will come to pick me up and take me where I need to go. The car will be clean; the driver will be friendly; the service will be prompt and inexpensive. I can't get that experience if I have to install an app in each city, potentially give each app horrible permissions (e.g., to get a ride in Some City I have to give the car company access to my files, my contacts and my email) &c. I travel a lot, and the quality of the Uber rides I've gotten has just been head-and-shoulders above the taxi rides.

Yeah but a taxi driver can buy a home and put a kid through college, perhaps even take a vacation once a year. An uber driver may have 6 or 8 months of economic boom but eventually the house of cards will come tumbling down. It is exactly the type of company that is destroying the middle class. It is also the status quo of making a few people extremely wealthy. If you use uber you're just contributing to the decline of western civilization. That seems a bit melodramatic and believe me I'm the first guy to be looking for a deal and stick it to the bloated establishment but uber cuts all the necessary corners, sticks it to the drivers yet it's so popular because it's cheap.

A taxi driver in London can't buy a home on his own income, don't be ridiculous. An uber driver in London can put a kid through college (it's basically free). Both can take vacations.

Anecdotally, uber showing up in London was when I started to use car transport in the first place. It didn't remove me from the customer pool of black cabs - I was never there; most of the time it's competing with the tube / a bus. I would guess the only significant customers moving from taxi to uber are business travelers - but those are rarely motivated by price, and rather it's the convenience of the app that appeals.

GPS killed taxi drivers, not uber; the wage is catching up to the fact that almost anyone could drive a taxi nowadays.

> and save lives too

Is this purely anecdotal, or is there something more to this statement? Just curious because it doesn't seem to fit into this general discussion, and I would imagine almost any taxi company also has anecdotes of saving lives.

Uber supporters often seem to think that the only alternative to an easy to use ride hailing app is driving drunk and killing someone. It would take some careful research to correlate Uber rides to drunk driving deaths and I have yet to see someone attempt it.

>You could easily build a company that does what Uber does in London without the hate for local Government that is ingrained into Uber's culture - and there already are a number of minicab companies that do what Uber does, just minus quite as fancy an app.

But that just begs, er, fully reduces to the question of ... why haven't they? Is a slick, user-friendly app really that much of a barrier? The article has tweets that are (nominally) from users who are freaking about being able to get a safe ride home late at night, so they at least believe there aren't good substitutes.

Frankly, it happened in Austin. Lyft and Uber threw a hissy fit and the market was happy to fill in the gaps.

> Frankly, it happened in Austin. Lyft and Uber threw a hissy fit and the market was happy to fill in the gaps.

Good luck with that, the markets are not remotely comparable:

Austin: 900k pop; In a red state known for low regulatory burden; No established mass transit to compete with; No established tax companies

London: 8.8M pop; High regulatory burden; City's incentive: each Uber rider is a potential lost customer for the Underground; Taxi companies have influence with legislators

The only incentive TFL has is to make travel as efficient as possible.

The underground is way too crowded, but so are the roads (mainly because of taxis these days).

This makes Uber a better bet than taxis (more efficient) buses better than both, bikes best of all and something in between a nirvana.

However, none of that matters as long as Uber think they're above the law.

> The only incentive TFL has is to make travel as efficient as possible.

TfL has the incentive to follow London mayoral policy; the MoL has concerns beyond travel.

Did it happen in Austin? According to this article, they were allowed back in a year later and no longer were asked to perform fingerprint based background checks.

> Did it happen in Austin?

NYC still requires fingerprint checks.

In Austin, the mayor and people voted in favor of the checks, but the state legislature killed the city's fingerprinting rule. Some argue this diminished the city's ability to self-govern. That part of the history, despite being quite short, is left out of this article.

They have:

https://www.addisonlee.com/apps/

They are more hated then Uber. Their CEO is just as infamous.

> You could easily build a company that does what Uber does in London without the hate for local Government that is ingrained into Uber's culture

You act like Uber flaunting local flaws is a flaw for the company. Ignoring 10,000 different sets of local laws in all the localities Uber operates is what made them successful.

It would have been impossible to expand as much as they had if the bothered dealing with the local bureaucrats, and they would have 10,000 sets of compliance to deal with.

Indeed. Perhaps it would be difficult to replicate what Uber did in SF and other US cities without breaking regulations - but in London, their model is perfectly replicable, as evidenced by the fact that they were originally given a license by TfL.

But here's an even better model: 1. Do a good job 2. Consumers use your service & rely on you 3. Wait for the government to try to shut you down 4. Consumers will back you 5. Government backs down & lets you do what you want

There's not going to be much public pressure on TfL to reverse this decision. Most Londoners don't use Uber, and there are plenty of alternatives.

391,499 Londoners (and counting) beg to differ: https://www.change.org/p/save-your-uber-in-london-saveyourub...

How do you know that everyone who's signed it is a Londoner?

Who wants to bet this petition has been started by Uber itself? How many of these votes are bought?

Something else that can happen is that citizens side with their elected representatives and start boycotting you in significant numbers.

This is a marvelous summation of exactly what is polarizing about Uber's business model, in specific, and the recently popular disregard for regulation and oversight of the Valley, in general.

Whether you read this as praise, or damnation, depends entirely on your belief system.

Sounds like you are endorsing the idea that laws and regulations just get in the way of business, while ignoring the purpose behind laws and regulations to begin with.

>if there's pent-up demand for a company that fills Uber's boots, one will pop up.

I think we saw that in Austin after Lyft/Uber were banned and people started the various Facebook and other groups to do the same thing. Not formal businesses, or even set charges.

I'm unfamiliar with uber in London or if it's any different than in the United States. I think it's only a matter of time before it gets shut down here and perhaps even have a class action lawsuit by present and former drivers. Uber claims to pay the highest wage at roughly $18/hr. which is a gross overstatement. I watched a Harvard math professor break it down to actually being $2.51/hour. She then outlined what it would take to run a business where the drivers are paid a decent wage, their vehicles are properly serviced & insured, business license, proper taxes, etc. You'll never guess what she came up with. Can you believe it? She came up with a figure that was pretty much identical to the average taxi cab fare today. Isn't that amazing? Imagine that.

I already got the begging email asking me to sign the petition. You're right that this feels like the wrong tone!

I signed it.

Valuing ethics over consumerism requires time and life experience.

What is the ethics of those who deny private companies the right to engage in volunteer transactions among people in the market?

Secondly, consumerism is possible only in the presence of production, and it cannot exist unless there's a product to consume. Are you questioning the ethics of value-production?

> What is the ethics of those who deny private companies the right to engage in volunteer transactions among people in the market?

You're breaking the law, laws with good reason.

> Secondly, consumerism is possible only in the presence of production, and it cannot exist unless there's a product to consume. Are you questioning the ethics of value-production?

Yes. Must I list human abuse that takes place because of "demand" and "production"? Child labor? Child prostitution? Slavery? Unregulated economics is anarchy.

> Yes. Must I list human abuse that takes place because of "demand" and "production"? Child labor? Child prostitution? Slavery? Unregulated economics is anarchy.

You are mixing together ethics of "producing a value as such" with immoral acts. One person's needs is not a claim on other people's life/time.

Slavery and child abuse is immoral based on exactly the same fundamental principle that makes regulations of volunteer trade in the market immoral - the principle that a human being belongs to oneself (which leads to the right to make decisions and to take choices based on their own reason and their capacity to think reasonably).

As for the child labour, it is not immoral as such - it's just a phenomenon of life that had better be absent in the contemporary society. Absence of it improves the quality of life, yet this quality is neither an inherent trait of life, nor something which is granted to a person upon his/her birth. It's quite the contrary - a human being must work in order to sustain their life and to prosper. It's a law of nature for all humans.

And an unregulated market multiplies opportunities for those who are willing to earn their own living by their work - by producing values and exchanging these values with other people, voluntarily, to a mutual benefit of each party. That's the essence of unregulated economy. And no government can either know beforehand or reasonably regulate or even be on the same page with all the possible volunteer transactions in the market that may benefit all parties. It's impossible because of a continuous technological advancement of humanity, of processes being improved and revisited for efficiency, and of many other aspects of human ingenuity. And that's why people might break laws - especially the laws imposed by government regulations, which are far from being reasonable most of the time.

> And an unregulated market multiplies opportunities for those who are willing to earn their own living by their work

I don't think that's true. Unregulated markets can result in a number of situations that limit people's opportunities significantly. Monopolies are a clear example and various externalities can also have significant impacts on commerce. To maximize the opportunities we need carefully tuned regulation. The problem is that our political systems for creating and enforcing that regulation are, shall we say, "a little broken".

> Unregulated markets can result in a number of situations that limit people's opportunities significantly. Monopolies are a clear example and various externalities can also have significant impacts on commerce.

Could you name an existing stable monopoly that is not a state-granted monopoly (i.e. a monopoly, that is not associated with government regulations, subsidies, grants, medallions, quotas and other things that have to do with regulating the market by the government), yet is capable of preventing other players from entering the same market?

> Could you name an existing stable monopoly that is not a state-granted monopoly.

No, because we have regulations to prevent them and break them up.

There are a number of entities that are clearly restraining their classically monopolistic behavior BECAUSE of the regulations such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

What's ethical about state-supported oligopolies?

If I have to pick between Silicon Valley oligopolies and state sponsored ones, I'll take the state; at least they're trying to protect their citizens.

What's ethical about letting Silicon Valley unicorns plunder world markets?

While not a popular topic here, Silicon Valley is starting to become the enemy.

SV is becoming the establishment the set out to "disrupt." Twice the son of hell.

What's ethical about Uber deciding for a city which laws and regulations are worth following?

See the difference in tone between London GM: "We are sure Londoners will be as astounded as we are by this decision. By trying to ban the app from the capital, the Mayor and Transport for London have caved in to a small number of people who want to restrict consumer choice."

And Dara, new CEO: "Going forward, it’s critical that we act with integrity in everything we do, and learn how to be a better partner to every city we operate in. That doesn’t mean abandoning our principles—we will vigorously appeal TfL’s decision—but rather building trust through our actions and our behavior. In doing so, we will show that Uber is not just a really great product, but a really great company that is meaningfully contributing to society, beyond its business and its bottom line."

Not only would it be an unpopular move, it would throw approximately 30,000 drivers out of work.

Not really. Almost all Uber drivers in London used to be minicab drivers (or work for e.g. Addison Lee), and the pay, rates, customer-base etc. are similar.

> Almost all Uber drivers in London used to be minicab drivers

Source?

It's natural - you still have to be licensed with tfl to drive uber; all minicab drivers were already licensed; uber is a better platform to drive for than a shitty call-in minicab company. So most of the drivers switched, and only people who have got licensed after uber showed up don't count as 'used to be minicab driver's.

All Uber drivers in london must be licensed by TFL to operate. That license is the valuable bit, and is entirely seperate to uber.

Why is the license a good idea? because it stops rapists posing as taxi drivers (which alas is still a problem even with prominant signage.)

Uber only provides a customer gateway, there are may other out there.

For those of you in the US, the important thing to note is that the market is much freer than say new york, there are only two requirements:

1) a safe car

2) a minicab license (https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...) which is reasonably cheap.

As a customer, I'm happy with that level of regulation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com