My app has to dodge around government regulation. It shouldn’t have to.

This is simple. The startup community needs a lobby, a real one.

We need a lobby to push for:

liberalized IP policy, including 28-year copyrights, an end to software patents, penalties for introducing frivolous copyright suits, an end to anti-circumvention, etc.

Looser immigration policies. If your IQ's above 130, you get in. If you have a graduate degree, you get in. If you've started a successful company before, you get in.

And mitigation of various kinds of red tape and local regulation like this.

A lobby like this would help to create a more vibrant, more productive startup community, and so ideally, the firms that benefit from same, especially the VC firms, would cooperate to fund it.

We can talk all we want about getting the money out of politics, but until that's done, I think we need to play ball. This is how things get done. This is how we get what we all want.

To attempt to clear up some confusion that has arisen in the discussion here: it wasn't my intention to come across as someone whining about how the government is ruining my idea. It isn't- as I mentioned in the article, I have plenty of avenues available to me. But yes, my life would be easier if the law were different.

My larger point was that most startups simply don't have the time or resources to dedicate to lobbying governments of any type for change, so instead we just have to dodge around our problems. That puts us behind the giant corporations who bend the law to their will.

The app I've been working on is held back by what I believe to be outdated thinking. I'd be interested to know what other HNers think about fixing something like this- is it even possible? Worth the effort?

I like your app, BUT : 1. You have not done your homework on the market before creating it, if you want to monetize it you should have and you probably should have targeted Europe where it's legal to book a cab. 2. How do you convince your app users that it's better to use the app than to call? App is free, calling costs - may work, may not. App needs internet, calling does not. That's where marketing comes in. Don't try to find guilty, try to find how to fix it. Good Luck.

If the yellow cab drivers have phones on them as well, you could try to make "psuedo hails" using bluetooth or something where if you drive by a taxono.my user who has hailed a cab both apps ping, and let the users know. Then you could just have the drivers app show a heatmap of hails throughout the city to get them in the right places.

Or. Operate the startup outside of the country in question. Regulations be damned. Innovate first. Ask forgiveness later. Be noisy about governments trying to squash innovation in the press. They hate that.

Why can't you just push the location of people needing a taxi to all the cabs, rather than pushing it to a specific one? Would that still be considered a booking?

Well Ron Paul is the solution right there - No government and regulation tyranny. research..

Stop asking for permission, start begging for forgiveness.

You can't "book" a cab from your app?

Fine, put a button to 'call' the cab.

You can't "book" in advance, use the data from your app to guess the time someone should call in advance to have a cab for when they need it, then send them an alert to make that call, along with aforementioned link.

You mention livery services for "booking" when a user needs something booked send them to a livery service.

There are a million solutions to your problems, you just have to find them. Also, avoid jurisdictions with regulations contrary to your business model.

Not sure how it works in the UK, but you can always sue over a law in the US if you really disagree with it and have a good reason for why it doesn't make sense. That's what we're doing.

Well as some one once told me "In some bits of America its still a bit like that" And in Chicago its "a Lot Like that"

What I think (and ime not going to be popular here) the USA needs is to totaly reorganise local govement far to may things are decided at too low a level for a modern and efficient state.

This meens radicaly doing away with "states rights" it makes no sense to have multiple sales and local income taxes - think how much monney would be saved by having a single sales tax.