It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Uber has gotten big enough (and has enough cash) to put up a pretty good fight in court.
At the same time, city attorney's have a lot of stuff on their plates. Obviously someone thought this was worth spending on time (aka the higher ups want it to happen).
I am all for reasonable regulation my Uber and it's kind and severe punishment for straying outside that regulation.
The thing is that unlike my own fine city of Minneapolis, many other metropolitan areas seem incapable or unwilling to respond reasonably to try to work with these companies to come to a mutually agreeable set of regulations.
The city governments are incompetent to do their jobs instead they throw around legal threats and the companies openly flaunt the law. Neither seem to be doing what's right.
I'm thinking more & more about decentralised p2p bitcoin based uber which cannot be ever shut down or controlled. Now it's becoming apparent that it's what world will soon need.
If it can't be shut down, there's nothing stopping violent muggers or kidnappers from participating as drivers. If there's a feedback system, there's nothing stopping Sybil attacks from gaming it and forging reviews en masse.
Of course there would still need to be either reputation systems or arbitration systems. The reason restaurants usually don't plainly defraud you isn't the threat of litigation, because litigation would cost much more than the value of the transaction. It's because they rely on reputation and repeat business.
Decentralized or massively federated reputation and arbitration networks are possible. Clever people would need to figure out a way to set things up, but it's certainly not a technological impossibility.
The bit about Uber saying it screened drivers thoroughly, and then the DA (or the office) finding examples where that was clearly not true is interesting and (IMHO) not unreasonable.
The weights and measures complaint I am curious about and wonder if it's to do with surge pricing. For the record I'm against surge pricing as I feel it amounts to usury in the Aquinian sense.
I wonder how many people in ordinary taxis got assaulted during the same time period. The DA's "failed background check" example reminds me of how one Model S caught on fire, and everyone freaked out and forgot that regular cars do that all the time, too.
Beyond the scope. The DA didn't say he wanted them to offer more thorough background checks or threaten to shut them down if they didn't. Likewise, afaik, he's also not going after taxi companies saying drivers aren't allowed to drive if they have records, because it's not illegal.
That said, I think it's completely reasonable for the city to ask these companies to stop lying to consumers to make us feel safer for the sake of their revenue.
I'm totally for innovation and everything that comes with it though. I want these companies to succeed (well, maybe not Uber) but them behaving in this way is going to make it more difficult from a legal perspective for the startups of tomorrow.
Anyway, does anyone know if there's any type of 'Startup Legal Counsel' where companies that are innovating faster than the the law is able to evolve can be advised on the laws they may be breaking or help them lobby to get relevant laws updated faster before it has to get to this point? Or should they just know better?
Yea and it wasn't really failed. Uber says they weed out people with dangerous driving records and the DA didn't mention the driver had one. The cited "Felony drug dealing" sounds really scary, but it was for selling weed five years ago. After this specific case Uber volunteered to make its background checks more rigorous.
George Gascón is not someone given to 'power tantrums'. On the contrary, he has a reputation for booth coolheadedness and very high ethical standards. I think you should read up on him before throwing stereotypes around.
Ebay auctions aren't a necessary utility, and gas station prices don't change on an hourly basis at the whim of a single corporation. (As far as I know?)
Surge pricing is necessary for more important goods, or else there will be a shortage!
When there is a hurricane, and the government declares a ban on "price gouging," then there is inevitably a shortage on things like gasoline, water, food, etc, because people by more than they need. When these goods cost more, people will tend to by only as much as they need. A sudden increase in demand should be met with a corresponding increase in price, but that is not allowed to happen. Furthermore, if the price of water, gas, and food goes up, then it is profitable for people to drive hundreds of miles in trucks with those goods to sell them, thus increasing the supply.
In the case of Uber and Lyft, surge pricing sorts out who really wants the rides. You might rethink going to the mall or the bar during surge pricing because you are competing with people who need those rides much more. If surge pricing was banned, then a traveler might not be able to get home from the airport because someone wanted an Uber ride to a sports bar to watch a football game.
In the case of Uber and Lyft, surge pricing sorts out who really wants the rides.
No it doesn't - it sorts out who really wants the ride and can pay the price. Like many things in economics, laws of supply and demand are expressed ceteris paribus - all other things being equal. When everyone has the same amount of money, then demand pricing does indeed reflect who wants a good or service more. But in the real world this isn't true, so the idealized law does not accurately model real economic behavior and thus you shouldn't build on such a shaky foundation.
One reason that regulators impose price controls on taxi services is to give people with lesser income a degree of predictability about what a taxi ride will cost. The downside of this is indeed shortages, but insofar as time is fungible surge pricing leads to shoratages as well, it's just that they only affect poorer people who have to wait for the richer people to exhaust their demand.
If surge pricing was banned, then a traveler might not be able to get home from the airport because someone wanted an Uber ride to a sports bar to watch a football game.
That really makes no sense. If a sufficiently exciting game is on then people may be willing to pay top $ to be taken to sports bars and make the ride from the airport unaffordable. Indeed, given the relative scarcity of football games to plane flights, surge pricing seems more likely to occur in response to a popular sporting event than a flight arrival. I'm perplexed as to why you assume the air traveler is willing or able to pay more (although we can easily understand wanting to take a cab instead of a bus or train after a tiring journey), or why you assume that this would necessarily lead to a more economically efficient result.
As a purely anecdotal observation, I've never had a problem getting a cab at an airport, and only rarely at a train station. Cab drivers also like predictability and while they might be able to make more via surge pricing during very busy periods, there's also value in having places where the demand is very predictable, like transit infrastructure. Like everyone else, cab drivers have different priorities - some may be happy to chase demand, others may need to work fixed hours because of family or contractual commitments, and want less income volatility.
I'm not railing against demand-based pricing here, I'm just pointing out that the real world is more complex than just supply and demand.
Tax revenue and obsolete concerns over safety and congestion. There's no reason there needs to be any regulation today past what you regularly need to drive a car: valid liability insurance, a driver's license, and a road-worthy vehicle.
Uber, et al are not going away so the governments need to figure out the proper amount of oversight and stop this ridiculous volley of shutdown threats.
Uh, yeah, sure, rich and powerful people need to "share" a rideservice. Riiiiiiight. That's why even the slightly upper class stores all deem it important enough to have valets ... their clientele is all taking Uber/Lyft/etc. ... suuuuure, you keep on believing that
The rich and powerful make money off of people dumb enough to believe in the concept of the "sharing" economy enough to be their peons.
It's interesting to contrast this article with the update that was just emailed out to the Uber Oklahoma list:
"Today, we are thrilled to announce that the Tulsa City Council and Mayor Bartlett have paved the way for a permanent home for uberX in Tulsa by signing the recently passed rideshare ordinance."
It is only a matter of time before these outfits are replaced by decentralised, actual peer-to-peer networks, either running off blockchain technology or similar decentralised databases, with no house take and the only option for government being charges against individual operators. There is no network lockin effect when drivers can easily install a competing app and drive for no commission to anyone else.
Facebook has a strong network effect in that everyone is on it and few regular people are interested in signing up for multiple social networks.
OTOH, rideshare drivers are incentivised to have as many (useful) rideshare apps on their phones as possible to maximise their ride volume, and customers are then incentivised to order their rides from the rideshare app with the lowest commission, and eventually a race to the bottom will result.
I think more people are willing to switch away from Uber/Lyft than from Facebook since (from what I understand about the service) there's nothing really personal about them except for user ratings. If a new competitor opened up tomorrow that promised to be decentralized with fewer fees, I'd bet on it succeeding. Facebook has many more purposes like communication, media hosting, and event planning (with a very strong network effect). People aren't going to give up on that platform very easily.
...and nothing stopung Sybil attacks from forging quality records/reviews/feedback, or bad actors (criminals, kidnappers, rapists, et c) from participating.
No thanks. Did you ever stop for a moment and think that perhaps people use Uber for a reason beyond "they developed an app"? It's the standard of service, silly.
Nothing except that fact that you and every other customer can choose to not patronize any drivers or services that don't provide the information or assurance that you require.
Yes, that strategy will work fine for my wife when she's leaving work at 3am and needs to get back home. It's fine, she can walk the seven miles - her knee doesn't begin to hurt until about five miles, anyway.
She could take whatever taxi or ridesharing service she thinks is legitimate. I doubt your wife is so unusual that there isn't a market for the type of car service she desires.
Theoretically, couldn't a decentralized ride-sharing system be made sybil attack-proof (or at least robust to it) with a feedback mechanism built on transitive trust?
A properly implemented reputation system works great. In addition to this the network could implement certification systems which allow trusted authorities to issue qualifications on certain drivers, eg. for those with a clean criminal record or those who have passed a local area knowledge examination
Out of curiosity can you point to a "properly implemented reputation system" that "works great?" And please don't cite online drug or carding markets they have centralized vetting, escrow services, high barriers to entry on both sides, and HUGE legal incentives to play nice and avoid legal attention.
The basic business model of a restaurant is repeat food sales. But some criminals are opportunists who are not worried about repeatability; they heavily discount the future in the face of a sufficiently attractive short-term payoff.
That's true, but the majority of taxi/ridesharing drivers, and the vast majority of honest well-behaved drivers, will want to be in the business for an extended period of time. There are various methods to pre-filter potential business partners by estimating their honesty. Reputation systems and signaling are two broad methods which I think can be adapted to the ridesharing sector.
I do not share your optimisim about reputation systems. One of the benefits of an employer (who can be regulated) is that they have an economic incentive to do that filtering on behalf of the customer in order to protect their own bottom line. I don't want to spend time figuring out if a cab driver is legit or not, life's too damn short for that. That's part of what I am paying for when I hire a cab.
I prefer having a third party to ensure quality and have recourse for disputes (it's nice to know that you can sue a company with $1,500,000,000 in venture capital if something goes really awry).
That said, drivers for these services are going to be replaced by self-driving cars.
A robust reputation system using chain of trust scoring to reduce the usefulness of sybil attacks would rapidly result in reliable, friendly, safe drivers building huge amounts of positive feedback, which would then self-reinforce improved customer service efforts to maintain their reputations.
If the online drug markets can use reputation systems to ensure fairplay amongst the vast majority of anonymous blackmarket trades then local taxi networks should be able to manage it too!
This is wrong on numerous levels. For starters, such a service would be materially inferior to what Uber is providing. The payment mechanism is almost irrelevant. What you describe would not be any more legal nor much harder to police. And you drastically overstate the commodity nature of the service (in fact, it's a winner take most/all scenario).
I hadn't really thought about it before but it strikes me as kind of odd that a taxi/limo/uber with one passenger would be allowed to use the car pool lane... given that the driver wouldn't otherwise be going there.
I think the reason is that the incentive of the carpool lane is to get fewer cars off the road, not to literally reward the act of carrying more than one person in a vehicle. To that end, taxis can use carpool because someone using a taxi is someone not driving a personal vehicle (and parking it at their destination, and driving back home later). If taxis are good enough, people won't buy cars, and fewer owned cars generally means fewer cars on the road.
Why is that odd? The "goal" was to incentivize multiple people per car.
Not unlike say, babysitters transporting their charges from school to daycare.
Some places put the limit at '3' to avoid just those situations (but it also freezes out couples going on a date) and at least one jurisdiction was quoted as allowing only vehicles at their 'full passenger capacity' what ever that is (which seems a bit extreme to me)
Yes the laws are outdated, but it almost seems like they are just ignoring all of them.
And of course the government feels pressure to stay relevant.
But legal threats and other government systems can't keep up with a fast-changing digital economy.
I think that we need some kind of effectively integrated system of regulation that can somehow represent the public good in a way that interfaces more directly with things like mobile apps and the blockchain, etc.
I also think we need to move away from a single-point-of-failure, all-powerful centralized government into something more egalitarian and decentralized. Maybe even polycentric.
Exactly how you do all of those things is an incredibly challenging set of problems.
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[ 26.4 ms ] story [ 435 ms ] threadAt the same time, city attorney's have a lot of stuff on their plates. Obviously someone thought this was worth spending on time (aka the higher ups want it to happen).
The thing is that unlike my own fine city of Minneapolis, many other metropolitan areas seem incapable or unwilling to respond reasonably to try to work with these companies to come to a mutually agreeable set of regulations.
The city governments are incompetent to do their jobs instead they throw around legal threats and the companies openly flaunt the law. Neither seem to be doing what's right.
You have to trust someone's opinion, somewhere.
Decentralized or massively federated reputation and arbitration networks are possible. Clever people would need to figure out a way to set things up, but it's certainly not a technological impossibility.
The weights and measures complaint I am curious about and wonder if it's to do with surge pricing. For the record I'm against surge pricing as I feel it amounts to usury in the Aquinian sense.
That said, I think it's completely reasonable for the city to ask these companies to stop lying to consumers to make us feel safer for the sake of their revenue.
I'm totally for innovation and everything that comes with it though. I want these companies to succeed (well, maybe not Uber) but them behaving in this way is going to make it more difficult from a legal perspective for the startups of tomorrow.
Anyway, does anyone know if there's any type of 'Startup Legal Counsel' where companies that are innovating faster than the the law is able to evolve can be advised on the laws they may be breaking or help them lobby to get relevant laws updated faster before it has to get to this point? Or should they just know better?
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Uber-driver-charged-wi...
Seems like a DA being a DA and it will go away once his power tantrum runs its course.
When there is a hurricane, and the government declares a ban on "price gouging," then there is inevitably a shortage on things like gasoline, water, food, etc, because people by more than they need. When these goods cost more, people will tend to by only as much as they need. A sudden increase in demand should be met with a corresponding increase in price, but that is not allowed to happen. Furthermore, if the price of water, gas, and food goes up, then it is profitable for people to drive hundreds of miles in trucks with those goods to sell them, thus increasing the supply.
In the case of Uber and Lyft, surge pricing sorts out who really wants the rides. You might rethink going to the mall or the bar during surge pricing because you are competing with people who need those rides much more. If surge pricing was banned, then a traveler might not be able to get home from the airport because someone wanted an Uber ride to a sports bar to watch a football game.
No it doesn't - it sorts out who really wants the ride and can pay the price. Like many things in economics, laws of supply and demand are expressed ceteris paribus - all other things being equal. When everyone has the same amount of money, then demand pricing does indeed reflect who wants a good or service more. But in the real world this isn't true, so the idealized law does not accurately model real economic behavior and thus you shouldn't build on such a shaky foundation.
One reason that regulators impose price controls on taxi services is to give people with lesser income a degree of predictability about what a taxi ride will cost. The downside of this is indeed shortages, but insofar as time is fungible surge pricing leads to shoratages as well, it's just that they only affect poorer people who have to wait for the richer people to exhaust their demand.
If surge pricing was banned, then a traveler might not be able to get home from the airport because someone wanted an Uber ride to a sports bar to watch a football game.
That really makes no sense. If a sufficiently exciting game is on then people may be willing to pay top $ to be taken to sports bars and make the ride from the airport unaffordable. Indeed, given the relative scarcity of football games to plane flights, surge pricing seems more likely to occur in response to a popular sporting event than a flight arrival. I'm perplexed as to why you assume the air traveler is willing or able to pay more (although we can easily understand wanting to take a cab instead of a bus or train after a tiring journey), or why you assume that this would necessarily lead to a more economically efficient result.
As a purely anecdotal observation, I've never had a problem getting a cab at an airport, and only rarely at a train station. Cab drivers also like predictability and while they might be able to make more via surge pricing during very busy periods, there's also value in having places where the demand is very predictable, like transit infrastructure. Like everyone else, cab drivers have different priorities - some may be happy to chase demand, others may need to work fixed hours because of family or contractual commitments, and want less income volatility.
I'm not railing against demand-based pricing here, I'm just pointing out that the real world is more complex than just supply and demand.
But having someone pick you up in a private vehicle and chauffeur you around is?
Given the absolute raft of laws that Uber/Lyft/et al. violate most of the DA's are being more respectful than I would have expected, actually.
SF could force these services to shut down tomorrow and they would be on very safe legal grounds.
The rich and powerful make money off of people dumb enough to believe in the concept of the "sharing" economy enough to be their peons.
"Today, we are thrilled to announce that the Tulsa City Council and Mayor Bartlett have paved the way for a permanent home for uberX in Tulsa by signing the recently passed rideshare ordinance."
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=8d2fd6968b2b5c64d0d22dba...
Edit Here's a copy of the ordinance: http://councildocs.tulsacouncil.org/SuperContainer/RawData//...
OTOH, rideshare drivers are incentivised to have as many (useful) rideshare apps on their phones as possible to maximise their ride volume, and customers are then incentivised to order their rides from the rideshare app with the lowest commission, and eventually a race to the bottom will result.
No thanks. Did you ever stop for a moment and think that perhaps people use Uber for a reason beyond "they developed an app"? It's the standard of service, silly.
Nothing except that fact that you and every other customer can choose to not patronize any drivers or services that don't provide the information or assurance that you require.
Meanwhile Uber has another PR headache as of last night... http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Uber-driver-accused-of-h...
That said, drivers for these services are going to be replaced by self-driving cars.
If the online drug markets can use reputation systems to ensure fairplay amongst the vast majority of anonymous blackmarket trades then local taxi networks should be able to manage it too!
Similarly, I like that I can call my credit card company and dispute a charge. The blockchain style of trust just means you get screwed.
Not unlike say, babysitters transporting their charges from school to daycare.
Some places put the limit at '3' to avoid just those situations (but it also freezes out couples going on a date) and at least one jurisdiction was quoted as allowing only vehicles at their 'full passenger capacity' what ever that is (which seems a bit extreme to me)
And of course the government feels pressure to stay relevant.
But legal threats and other government systems can't keep up with a fast-changing digital economy.
I think that we need some kind of effectively integrated system of regulation that can somehow represent the public good in a way that interfaces more directly with things like mobile apps and the blockchain, etc.
I also think we need to move away from a single-point-of-failure, all-powerful centralized government into something more egalitarian and decentralized. Maybe even polycentric.
Exactly how you do all of those things is an incredibly challenging set of problems.