S.F., L.A. threaten Uber, Lyft, Sidecar with legal action

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-L-A-threaten-Uber-Lyft-Sidecar-with-5781328.php

by ilamont • 12 years ago

35 59 12 years ago

refurb• 12 years ago

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).

walterbell2• 12 years ago

It rarely results in meaningful regulation of the business, yet provides endless free publicity and brand building.

colechristensen• 12 years ago

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.

cwiz• 12 years ago

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.

sneak3• 12 years ago

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.

You have to trust someone's opinion, somewhere.

baddox7• 12 years ago

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.

bigdubs• 12 years ago

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.

Meekro• 12 years ago

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.

richcsmith• 12 years ago

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?

jonknee3• 12 years ago

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.

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.

UrMomReadsHN• 12 years ago

Taxi drivers are probably much more likely to be the victims of crimes.

qq66• 12 years ago

Are you against demand-based pricing for other things? Such as eBay auctions, fluctuating gas prices, etc?

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

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?)

a8da6b0c91d• 12 years ago

How is demand pricing usurious? Are you against airlines charging more on Fridays and closer to flight dates etc.?

cycrutchfield• 12 years ago

How is it usury to charge a price that is set by demand for a service?

pbreit3• 12 years ago

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.

bsder3• 12 years ago

Um, not at all.

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.

aianus3• 12 years ago

I'd imagine the rich and powerful citizens of SF are regular users of Uber et al. Doesn't seem like the wisest political move to shut it down.

pbreit3• 12 years ago

Does it really make sense for there to be a "raft of laws" concerning driving people around for money? What is the purpose of such laws?

clarkm• 12 years ago

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."

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=8d2fd6968b2b5c64d0d22dba...

Edit Here's a copy of the ordinance: http://councildocs.tulsacouncil.org/SuperContainer/RawData//...

toasted5• 12 years ago

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.

smaili• 12 years ago

I disagree. People were saying the same thing about Facebook and Diaspora but that never actually happened.

sneak3• 12 years ago

That's because diaspora sucked. The distributed social network is coming.

jMyles• 12 years ago

Wow, this is the impatience of our age. How long do you give a network distribution methodology before you declare it a failure?

toasted5• 12 years ago

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.

frewsxcv• 12 years ago

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.

sneak3• 12 years ago

...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.

baddox7• 12 years ago

and nothing stopung Sybil attacks from...

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.

applecore• 12 years ago

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?

mwfunk• 12 years ago

That sounds awesome- you'd get all the safety and accountability of hitchhiking, plus you'd have to pay for it!

toasted5• 12 years ago

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

jonknee3• 12 years ago

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.

toasted5• 12 years ago

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!

pbreit3• 12 years ago

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).

tunesmith• 12 years ago

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.

eridius• 12 years ago

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.

baddox7• 12 years ago

Is "transit lane" the same thing as a carpool lane?

mikeryan• 12 years ago

No, in SF and other urban areas transit lanes are exclusively for taxis and buses.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

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)

ilaksh• 12 years ago

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.

S.F., L.A. threaten Uber, Lyft, Sidecar with legal action

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