You're probably right, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the government passed a law enforcing that some day.
But - in this particular case, I have to say that Uber had nothing on Yandex, who has been in the Russian maps and taxi business far longer and their navigation app is absolutely top notch (you should see how it lays out the route, and the funny jokes the navigation voice cracks when you're stuck in traffic), as well as their taxi app. Yandex is a very clever company and infrastructure questions aside, they are hard to compete with.
In fact, I'd argue that Yandex's technology is better in some respects than Uber or Apple's and Google's (if we're talking maps) but you will not see Yandex taxi service in the USA for the exact same reason you've stated, in the US it will be a US company.
BTW, Google is only #2 search engine in Russia as far as I know, simply because Yandex is better. I often find myself checking ya.ru when searching for Russian words when Google comes up empty.
I talked to Moscow taxi drivers on more than one occassion and they were dismissive of Uber as an older and inferior iteration of what Yandex.Taxi was doing. Uber was never at the top, but at a fairly distant second, so their minority-shareholder "merge" with YT is of no surprise.
I think that's not quite true. The industry (oil, car manufacturing, software, etc.) is pretty much dependent on the Western products and tech.
Besides Uber, GetTaxi is quite popular in Russia. And there are more local similar taxi services besides Yandex, but they are less known. In general, Uber and Yandex are the most popular at the moment.
"Uber will invest $225 million and take a 36.6 percent stake ... Yandex will invest $100 million and own 59.3 percent"
If they are paying twice as much as their partner for a minority stake I am pretty sure they will not be coming away with anything.
Travis didn't just want to dominate the industry, he wanted to dominate the world: a megalomania to a whole new level.
First of all, you're saying that mobile-first services were launched because cabs were crap. The market was good because the market was bad?
Medium-size cities had very cheap fixed-rate taxi-by-telephone services. Like, whole city flat rate for $3 in driver's own old beater.
Meanwhile Moscow had awful taxi services (very unreliable and expensive) and you had better luck just lifting your hand when near the road (yes, that's how it actually worked).
Then Yandex launched their Taxi and reliability of service rose very fast while prices fell. Then, GetTaxi and Uber also entered market, as well as some smaller players like Maxim and Saturn. Yandex is still heavily focused on Moscow with unreliable coverage everywhere.
And that's the price of Uber as well, which can go up in rush hour, but we now have Taxify as well, which I prefer because their prices are more predictable.
So when you're saying that you paid $200 for 30 rides, that seems expensive to me.
