Uber agrees $178M payout to Australia taxi drivers | Hacker News Reader

Uber agrees $178M payout to Australia taxi drivers

bbc.com

23 pointspeutetre19 comments

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39738862

Taxis in Australia, like many other places, used to abuse their customers. Uber truly made a difference; these days, Uber may represent questionable value in Australia, but at the very minimum they managed to change the behaviour of an entire industry, which is a huge positive.

I can't say I had lots of experience with taxi in Australia, but after getting cabs on the on the east coast, then moving to Sydney in the late 90s - the difference was amazing. Cabs everywhere, arrived quickly, could pay by card (EFTPOS was pretty new out there then, but seemed heaps better than the UK) - and I could easily get cash back (essentially a cash withdrawal) from the taxi driver when I paid my fare.

I'd rarely got cabs in the UK, but a similar journey in Sydney would be the same in AU$ as it was in GB£ - at the time it was 2 dollars to the pound too.

Good. Uber has definitely improved the taxi experience in Australia, but operating at a loss to get business with heavy undercutting at the scale Uber did harms the market potentially permanently.

And operating illegally.

I'm not a fan of how taxis in Australia are operated, but the law was there to prevent unapproved businesses to pick up passenger.

The law was ignored and it impacted real people who had owned taxi licence plates, sometimes for generations. At $350k a pop, it was an asset that came under attack.

Won't somebody please think of monopoly rent seekers?

Uber acted in the same shitty way and ran illegal taxis and price dumped even in places which did not have monopolies. This is their modus operandi, illegally enter new markets and then paying the fines and starting to follow the law once caught.

Exactly. There should be additional penalties each time a parent entity operates this way across regions. Right now 180M is just the cost of doing business in a country for Uber. There is less incentive to not operate illegally for other players.

Why would you want the other players to not operate illegally?

$180M is 10% of Uber’s global net income for 2023. Sure seems like a lot for one country.

Also, it looks like it wasn’t even for Australia as a whole, just one state?

Uber's global revenue was $22.5B in just the year 2023. This class action lawsuit has been dragging on since 2019. I completely get the 'regulatory capture' aspect everyone is supporting Uber for but breaking laws and regulations as a M.O. needs to be dealt with more than a slap on the wrist.

That's revenue my man. Uber's last quarter income from operations was $658m. So $180m isn't far off 10%. Also look at same time the year before, they are way in the hole. This fine will hurt them (if they ever have to pay it).

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

It only was an "asset" because they created a restricted supply oligopoly. Somehow they were being rewarded for very ordinary service. Uber created a necessary disruption to shake up the identity.

Licences could be non-transferable, to solve this "market".

In many jurisdictions these licences are given for free by the government, and can be sold 150k/200k+.

you think $350k is a fair amount? if anything, the government should have be sued for this non-sense.

That asset value is made out of rent. It has baked into it an assumption of market inefficiencies in the form of excess profits.

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