You don't have to change the subject to be about my capacity for imagination, or some bias you perceive in other HN conversations.
There aren't 10 such companies now. There might never be. Nor is there yet any evidence of consumer harm.
Imagining the worst when it might never materialize is a bad basis for policy. Especially with all the new factors which provide stronger, more-immediate checks on bad-actors: many of which apply to one operator or 100 equally well.
Why not give them a chance to work before constraining new operators to an ancient system which (a) disappointed customers with scarcity; and (b) got captured by incumbents?
This thread began with me describing the general case, "these modern rideservices".
I happen to think there will be few of these modern rideservices, rather than many, because the matching/reputation market has natural monopoly characteristics. But that's just an aside.
The tech/market/reputation checks I've been describing don't depend on Uber or any particular company. They are inherent to the category. I am making a case for the modern mobile-dispatched-and-billed rideservices category, not Uber specifically.
(My guess would also be that the average customer is more likely to someday face economic 'harm' from an eventual dispatcher monopoly, than from the sort of dangerous/abusive/unaccountable car/driver issues that you've been mentioning. But those sorts of antitrust concerns also need to be handled in retrospect, after observing how they develop, and not based on anticipatory paranoia about what might someday happen.)
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You don't have to change the subject to be about my capacity for imagination, or some bias you perceive in other HN conversations.
There aren't 10 such companies now. There might never be. Nor is there yet any evidence of consumer harm.
Imagining the worst when it might never materialize is a bad basis for policy. Especially with all the new factors which provide stronger, more-immediate checks on bad-actors: many of which apply to one operator or 100 equally well.
Why not give them a chance to work before constraining new operators to an ancient system which (a) disappointed customers with scarcity; and (b) got captured by incumbents?
You don't design public policy based on the interests and controls of one single private company.
This thread began with me describing the general case, "these modern rideservices".
I happen to think there will be few of these modern rideservices, rather than many, because the matching/reputation market has natural monopoly characteristics. But that's just an aside.
The tech/market/reputation checks I've been describing don't depend on Uber or any particular company. They are inherent to the category. I am making a case for the modern mobile-dispatched-and-billed rideservices category, not Uber specifically.
(My guess would also be that the average customer is more likely to someday face economic 'harm' from an eventual dispatcher monopoly, than from the sort of dangerous/abusive/unaccountable car/driver issues that you've been mentioning. But those sorts of antitrust concerns also need to be handled in retrospect, after observing how they develop, and not based on anticipatory paranoia about what might someday happen.)