Hacker News Reader

That marketing line was ridiculous. Uber is a multinational corporation fighting lots of small local taxi operations, but somehow they've managed to paint themselves as an underdog fighting a "taxi mafia".

>Uber's shtick is to complain about the evil taxi cartels, while statements like yours indicate that they're really the biggest of them all.

By rolling with an approved and expensed option, which eliminates certain amount of ambiguity, does not imply that Uber is part of a cartel; irrespective of it's licensing woes and/or impending banishment from multiple lucrative markets. At present, it does not even enjoy a majority position to form an alliance, let alone collude with locally competitive operators.

It's weird - the old taxi companies had their localised oligopolies by law, Uber and Lyft and so on have their global oligopoly through a few other means, not the least of which is their ability to spend billions of Saudi petrobucks on customer acquisition.

But the fact that they offer a fairly consistent experience certainly does help them.