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Comment by bschne | Hacker News Reader

This only occurred to me now in reference to Uber and other serial offenders, and I don't know what the situation in other countries is, but... In Switzerland there's actually a law against unfair competitive practices, and it has a clause prohibiting you from constantly or repeatedly (i.e. not as a one-off clearance sale or whatever) offering goods or services below cost! Wonder how it would go if you were to sue one of these companies operating here under that...

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Uber operates in "strict" (as in 'technically correct') adherence to local policy. That means, in places where the policy is strict, like for example Italy (Milan), they have only licensed taxi drivers with licensed taxi cars. And where law allows (even with a loophole) they have less.

Uber is structured so that each country has one business entity, thus it's very easy for them to say "our Swiss entity does not do any such thing in Switzerland". Many EU countries have similar laws too, btw - and they have a very clear separation of base price and promo price here, and the base price is regulated.

This sounds like a great way to quantify policy/law impact on businesses, by comparing their financial performance.

Obviously to an extent it can be compared, but considering laws aren't the only difference (economics of how many people in each country need work at what price, culture of who owns cars vs uses taxis vs cycles, etc etc) it would take an awful lot of analysis to compare them usefully (which no doubt various people both inside and outside Uber are doing, of course - and Ive no knowledge of how successful they are at that).

You couldn't just look at one being twice as profitable and say "that's the effect of country A's legal regulations vs. country B's".

Also I'm not sure the data is available, does the US entity which is publicly traded have to report on all subentities' financials separately? Don't they usually just consolidate the financials?

The individual local business entities have their own mandatory data publication requirements. At least in EU, it's usual for companies to have to share some economical data publicly (usually there's a minimum on revenue but Uber certainly is over).

Lots of countries have laws like that, not only Switzerland, but they are hardly ever enforced because it would make people very upset. Way too many things are priced below production cost like e.g. the web browsers we're using to have this conversation.

Also, although this article describes Uber as a transfer of money from "labor to capital", in reality it's been the other way around. Uber and the like have been massive transfers of money from capital to labor - that's exactly why they're unprofitable. They pay labor more money than they get from customers and make it up from investor cash. This sort of thing is very popular with voters, even if the more astute may think about the longer term effects on competition etc, most don't care. What they see is that they can order a really cheap taxi ride via a nice app, and if the government demanded it be profitable, that wouldn't exist.

Don't under-estimate how much people love free/cheap stuff. Market dumping is bad in the long run but imagine what would happen to the software world if these laws were actually enforced. Open source would probably be made illegal!

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