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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

It's like Uber is run by the mob. At what point will the feds step in?

Uber has (somewhat correctly) predicted that the feds are so slow and the penalties so small, running things like the mob will pay off. After all, their whole "disruption" is "how about we just ignore all the taxi legislation". See also, AirBnB with "how about we just ignore all the hotel legislation".

I don't think its a great comparison. Uber has repeatedly broken the law including stealing trade secrets, spying on competitors, and sabotaging them. They aren't toeing the law to figure out what regulations make sense for ridesharing. They are flagrantly breaking every rule so they win.

Well, not all the rules; so far as I'm aware nobody has got killed.

Does make me wonder how far people are going to take "disruption". Could a company decide to make their self-driving cars more successful by hacking their competitors to cause accidents? What about hacking your competitors' factory SCADA systems? Possibly with the help of a foreign intelligence agency?

After all, this is the cyberpunk future we were promised.

Haha fine, no murder conviction yet

You could say that incidents like this leave them indirectly responsible for rapes and murders though: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/28/lawsuit-claims-uber-ignore...

In some European countries, AirBnB no longer has a free reign as people are now required to pay taxes for renting rooms, not doing so is considered tax evasion.

Not paying taxes on AirBnB income is also considered tax evasion in the US. I doubt there's any meaningful enforcement, but it's no more legal in the US than in Europe.

No, paying taxes on income is something different. You of course have to pay taxes for your whole income; new taxes that include requirements for explicit registration and so on have been introduced.

The state of Washington in the US has a one time fee of a couple of thousand dollars if you want to use a property as an AirBNB. It's per-property and goes to the property (so if you sell it, the new owner gets that grant as well).

> After all, their whole "disruption" is "how about we just ignore all the taxi legislation"

The laws I'm familiar with for taxis specifically apply to a vehicle that you hail (wave down) from the street. If you call a car service and arrange someone to pick you up, the rules are entirely different than taxis. Uber found a way to make it really easy to arrange for someone to pick you up which is what allowed them to use drivers who only met the car service requirements. In general, their innovation was to reduce the inconvenience of arranging a ride with a car service and make it even more convenient than dealing with a taxi.

(I'm not saying they haven't ever done anything that ignored legislation, but it is a stretch to say that their primary innovation was to ignore taxi laws.)

Next SV pitch: "it's like Uber for organised crime".

semi-seriously though - I can imagine in a work of science fiction a "sharing economy" of people willing to trade time for work doing criminal activities evolves. There must have been such a novel written already. Thinking a bit more morally, how about an "Uber for police" where citizens can be contracted at short notice to trade time for work against criminals.

There is a lot of joke on how Cryptocurrency was for that (drugs & guns being the butt of the joke). It seems the current uptick is more related to getting money out of controlled change system (China and Zimbabwe). I can see how the ethics of accessing saving instruments or storing capital in a non-collapsing currency is different than organised crime but it is still technically illegal.

Sort of sounds like the Shadowrun universe, honestly.

Black Mirror already did it, with a bonus extortion angle. It was called "Shut Up And Dance".

I think it’s more accurate to say that the valley has done an incredible job of dressing up the tactics of organized crime under some weird, half-intelligible fetishism of “disruption.” Most of the things Uber and their ilk do are indistinguishable from mob tactics, they just have better PR.

I agree that some of the things Uber gets blamed for are commonplace and Uber is just being held to a different standard. But, it is also true that Uber pushed a lot further into the dark side than other companies.

For example, do Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook set up surveillance of hotel and conference rooms of executives from other companies?

Those companies have competive intelligence, but they aren’t run like a college fraternity on probation, so I doubt you’ll find those kind of abuses.

Facebook’s business model is essentially surveillance. Same with Google, who was also involved with illegal, wide-scale wage fixing. Amazon is notorious for labor abuses, and Microsoft’s history on all these fronts is storied. And they all court and pay off politicians to avoid repercussions. The mob of old could only dream of having this kind of reach.

Uber is not really a different standard. They’re more like an upstart gangster faction whose lack of discretion is calling attention to the baseline amorality and criminal intentions that lurk beyond the (quite thin) veil of techno-utopianism. The big guys lean on this ideology to get away with what they’re doing and thus don’t like Uber undermining it with their flagrant criminality.

Mistaking investor happiness for a moral compass, what could possibly go wrong

They are already investigating which is why much of the document is still redacted.

Indeed, given all the press I have read about them (I don't have any insider knowledge), it does seem that Uber has much more in common with a criminal enterprise than a legitimate business.

One generation of bureaucrats after the business relationship ceases to be profitable.

Look at what happened to Whitey. There was no serious progress going after him until after all the people who stood to lose anything from it retired away with their pensions. Regardless of their pros/cons as an instrument of financial security tying future financial security so directly to time spent serving the status quo puts a obstacle in the way of any sort of high speed change to how things are done.

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