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Comment by zipy124 | Hacker News Reader

I mean a lot of successful new tech companies were about side-stepping legislation. Some that are missing here are airbnb which effectively side-stepped fairly strict hotel legislation (Though there is a case to be made that it simply improved short-term lodging), and uber which side-stepped strong taxi/private-hire legislation.

This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.

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Sure, abstractly tech startups in the past have been successful while side-stepping legislation. Do you think they were all good for the world?

And concretely, for the startups listed in the article - such as Doublespeed, which sells access to “phone farms” with thousands of fake social media accounts and ultimately aims to replace human content creators - do you think they will improve society by succeeding?

And thank god they did. I'm old enough to remember the hell of the taxi cartel.

I’m old enough to remember the heavenly times before people repeated phrases like “the taxi cartel” as if they were original thoughts vs. cooked up by Uber’s comms team.

have you actually used a pre-uber taxi?

you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.

nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson

Years before Uber arrived here local taxi companies already had an iPhone app with geo-location, up-front digital payment, and receipts I could directly import into the company ledger app. Taxis were regulated and forced to give cost up-front in the app and in the window of the vehicle. That is what taking a taxi was here before Uber arrived. That company changed nothing other than to dilute the meaning of worker versus contractor and Uber made it easier for registered sex offenders to become drivers because that company had less stringent requirements.

> have you actually used a pre-uber taxi?

I actually did, though not frequently (mostly just getting to and from the airport). They were fine. Car always showed up, I never got ripped off.

I accept that Uber and Lyft made getting taxis easier for more than just those use cases.

This is heavily dependent on where we are talking about.

I live in a fairly rich place and here, taxis were fine, too. When Uber came, they mostly just eroded salaries and protections for taxi drivers, while lowering the quality of service for customers (though also, for a short while, the price). The best I can say about it is that it accelerated the digital transformation of the industry a bit.

On the other hand, I heard from several people from other places in the world that the arrival of Uber meant that they could finally get a safe and reliable ride.

It was a literal cartel. It could not more clearly be a cartel.

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