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Comment by Grimm1 | Hacker News Reader

Legitimate question, will Uber shut down it's Dutch operations now? Will this cost them more money than it's worth to operate there, and would they shutdown to send a message to other nations about there intent should similar rulings be made?

Uber's margins have always been super thin, I would imagine this makes them squarely unprofitable in the Dutch market.

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This is what is likely to happen to Uber almost everywhere eventually. Courts will slowly re-impose the workers rights that Uber set out to avoid, the cost of an uber ride will go up, which will shift riders back to more traditional transport - busses, trains, bicycles and cars. Leaving a much smaller, much less powerful Uber. Without the scale and the price making power, Uber will see its value massively massively drop shrinking to the value of a large taxi company (albeit one that's throwing huge amounts of money away on extremely expensive silicon valley engineers)

And in the background, consumers get fucked.

Your convenience does not matter if employees are being exploited.

Who decides what's exploitation? Me? You? The drivers? Uber? The court system? Who may be right or wrong?

usually the legal branch of a country.

You know, the legal definition of what is exploitative labour and what isn't.

> Will this cost them more money than it's worth to operate there

But isn't that already the case? I not sure Uber is making a profit anywhere in the world, so maybe they don't care if they lose $0.58 or $0.75 per ride?

If other taxi companies can operate under these terms then so can Uber. The margins are thin for other taxi companies too.

The question is perhaps: is Uber interested in being just another taxi company, withut much of a disruptive edge?

Uber has done that before, I'd not be surprised

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