But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
They created a project named Greyball to identify law enforcement and mislead them.
They created a kill switch for the event of a government raid to gather evidence.
They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps.
They tracked journalists and politicians...
The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.
Sure, Medallion laws had problems, and got Regulatory Captured in some cities to also become terrible Trusts controlling prices that needed busting. But the answer to "fix the Regulation" isn't always "break the Regulation", and the Regulation had a lot of good intent of having public accessible information about drivers and that data not just owned by a single company and locked in their opaque algorithms. It might have been nicer to fix the Regulatory Capture and Bust the Trusts.
You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
> Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
Yes, and they owe their current existence to Uber paving the way for them.
