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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

I'm part of the problem. I always suspected my Uber ride was financed with venture money. So i always went with Uber. But i didn't think ahead to the fact that it would kill off the competition.

What i don't get it is what the Uber moat is? Why does this need to be centrally planned and controlled? Would an open source and free platform work where drivers got near 100 percent of the sale instead of the 75% they get today.

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Uber's moat is its network. Can't get any drivers if there are no riders and can't get riders if there are no drivers. This means you need to start by offering drivers more money than you make in order for them to use the app. An open source solution wouldn't be able to get off the gorund.

The direct fix for this (which I believe has happened in some countries) is to ban them from asking drivers to enter into exclusivity or minimum volume agreements with them. Then drivers can work for multiple networks.

> Then drivers can work for multiple networks.

They already can do that? (and very often do)

Yes - I believe Uber used to have a number of terms which made that difficult in practice (eg restrictions on numbers of rides rejected/accepted per day, etc). In at least some countries though competition authorities have banned these.

Uber's moat is the inertia of its massive customer and not-employee base making it difficult to enforce the regulations it has historically flaunted. In that way, it's similar to why Mastodon can't kill Facebook.

The open source and free platform be able to handle the patchwork of regulations that are now in place that differ between city to city

It isn't the consumer's responsibility to solve this problem. That's the government's job.

No cause the entire point is that it’s a finance game that just happens to build products

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