During the early days of Uber, it was breaking Australian trade practices law in the regulated taxi industry. Uber told drivers it would give them financial backing, if taken to court.
I believe this was in itself, a significant departure from business ethics: It may be the regulations were bad, but inviting drivers to become scofflaw and offering them indemnity from payment in civil suit, feels like taking corporate lawfare into a new realm.
Quite aside from this disregard for Australian Business law, Uber was transfer pricing the profits from the taxi business into the USA. It operated at a loss in Australia, and exported a lot of revenue to the USA.
There was, and continues to be, many problems with taxi as a business, and the regulator was highly deficient. These problems relate to reliability, driver ethics, safety for women, minorities (things like drivers refusing to take seeing-eye dogs, and hassling solo women riding home) -I'm not blind to the failure here and I do not personally view this as "all regulated industries are worse than free enterprise" -the regulator just couldnt be bothered enforcing it's requirements.
The real problem was that the cost of a taxi plate rose over a 20 year period at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Towards the end, a taxi plate was a $500k investment and was owned by many ex accountants, lawyers, doctors and the like as a massive capital gain, independently of the social utility of running taxi as a function. -This destroyed the real driver cooperative movement, and made restriction of entry to taxi a necessary economic forcing function: all attempts to add drivers deflated the capital value of the plate, and were opposed by the current owners.
When this was eventually liquidated (Dublin for example) the capital losses were extreme. A $500k plate could drop to $10k or less. A lot of people had life savings eroded, the industry collapsed. Brisbane wasn't much different. Canberra had this too.
London, cities with a high barrier to entry like "the knowledge" and the LEZ have different models. I don't know if Uber is in London.
I believe this was in itself, a significant departure from business ethics: It may be the regulations were bad, but inviting drivers to become scofflaw and offering them indemnity from payment in civil suit, feels like taking corporate lawfare into a new realm.
Quite aside from this disregard for Australian Business law, Uber was transfer pricing the profits from the taxi business into the USA. It operated at a loss in Australia, and exported a lot of revenue to the USA.
There was, and continues to be, many problems with taxi as a business, and the regulator was highly deficient. These problems relate to reliability, driver ethics, safety for women, minorities (things like drivers refusing to take seeing-eye dogs, and hassling solo women riding home) -I'm not blind to the failure here and I do not personally view this as "all regulated industries are worse than free enterprise" -the regulator just couldnt be bothered enforcing it's requirements.
The real problem was that the cost of a taxi plate rose over a 20 year period at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Towards the end, a taxi plate was a $500k investment and was owned by many ex accountants, lawyers, doctors and the like as a massive capital gain, independently of the social utility of running taxi as a function. -This destroyed the real driver cooperative movement, and made restriction of entry to taxi a necessary economic forcing function: all attempts to add drivers deflated the capital value of the plate, and were opposed by the current owners.
When this was eventually liquidated (Dublin for example) the capital losses were extreme. A $500k plate could drop to $10k or less. A lot of people had life savings eroded, the industry collapsed. Brisbane wasn't much different. Canberra had this too.
London, cities with a high barrier to entry like "the knowledge" and the LEZ have different models. I don't know if Uber is in London.