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This is an excellent advertising strategy and cities play right into their hand - go launch in a new place, knowingly bend some old taxi laws and get served, make huge deal about it stopping innovation and be featured on every local news channel and newspaper. City changes old laws, doesn't want to look bad. That creates another multimillion dollar round of free advertising so everyone in town knows about them. Bravo.

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Anecdotally, it seems to be working. When I asked my Boston Uber driver last night about his workload recently he said that it's been much, much higher in the last week. He also attributed it to people hearing about the service for the first time due to the controversy and increased media coverage. He expects it to increase even more as the college students return over the next few weeks.

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