Ride sharing isn't a problem, and Uber isn't ride sharing (despite the tech media insistence on this doublespeak), it's just a pirate taxi.
The question is whether it makes sense in Europe at scale, or whether it should be limited to the kind of low-density urban developments that are typical for the US.
There are taxi companies, but people are free to get a taxi permit and be a taxi driver without a boss. These guys use Uber now, and it seems to be working good.
The rating of drivers and customers seems to be well received, especially from my conversations with drivers. Also you have history in the Uber app, so if something happens, you forgot something, you know which car and which driver, or the driver knows which customer. This is almost impossible in a regular taxi unless you take time to bother to write down the driver details and the taxi car number.
There is still some issues with drivers not getting appropriately compensated for trips, and there's been a lot of attention to drivers not getting the extra cut of the surge pricing, Uber takes it all. Obviously not fair, but in the bigger picture of things it is good.
That sounds pretty awesome, to be fair.
At least "taxi cartel" is a very popular phrase in Uber's PR.
Why do you need special permission from the State to let people buy someone's driver services through your site? It's just commerce. Pay taxes on it, sure, but call it being a pirate? Whose property rights are you pirating?
Let's look at an alternative end game: drivers start to market themselves to passengers directly, and keep all the money. Well how do they do that - obviously on the same place, it has to be centralized somehow, there has to be a place to look them up.
So there would be some cheap free alternative where drivers can sign up but keep all of the cash from each ride. All right, nobody's built that yet.
Since it costs just a few tens of hours of development time and hosting that is just a few dollars a month, suppose you build that.
Should you, TeMPOraL, be legally forbidden for making that free web site, yourself, literally coding up a place where where drivers can coordinate with passengers and keep all of their earnings?
Because, after all, by your standard this makes you a pirate.
Uber isn't a small underdog that bends some rules here and there. They're a large multinational backed by billions of dollars, whose modus operandi is blatant disregard of the law and antisocial behavior.
Personally, I do believe most of the intellectual property laws range from bad to wrong to batshit insane, but I don't start a company whose main business model is violating these laws, and using investor money to keep the enforcement at bay.
Now granted Uber is a business, there are certain minimum compliance things such as taxes. But I don't share your view that everyone needs to follow all rules no matter how technical.
In a sense it's clear that uber is "just an app".
But if you look at Uber's history, you get quite a different picture. They went into the ride share business knowing they'll be violating many major rules in most cities they try to operate, and then they just proceeded to violating those rules without attempting to find a better solution; instead, they continue to burn money to escape enforcement, and they've built special software whose explicit purpose is to help them hide from regulators.
Uber's approach to local regulations is entirely antagonistic, which is something I don't like. Adding to that all the other stories about their abusive behavior with respect to drivers, customers and journalists, it paints to me a picture of a very antisocial company - in the sense that they're willing to exploit and abuse anyone for profit, without paying any attention to laws. It's a much different thing than discussing an off law that's arguably unjust or out of touch with reality.
why are you basically OK with legal enforcement of the status quo to the point that you want a company to be unable to float its alternative model? I really don't get it.
It means operating without a proper license, in this case from the government. You may have heard pirate radio referred to as "stealing the airwaves", one could also say that pirate taxis are "stealing the public road space", both of which are public/shared property.
>Because, after all, by your standard this makes you a pirate.
It's not TeMPOraL's standard, it's the government's standard and the laws that matter and which make it a "pirate".
The problem with Uber is that they've entered this regulated space and unilaterally decided to ignore all those regulations. Sure, they don't get the special benefits, but they also don't share the burdens. Thus they easily outcompete the taxis on the profitable routes, leaving the regular taxi companies to work the unprofitable ones, which they usually are required by law to serve.