[failuser]

Uber and AirBnb are essentially illegal taxi and illegal hotel services. Remember taxi medallions? Remember zoning laws? Being illegal is not a showstopper for a startup because they are under a radar, being illegal is not a problem for a large business because they have enough power to not get prosecuted.

[teraflop]

Anybody else remember that time YC funded an international smuggling operation?

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/backpack

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8199286

[darby_nine]

Hell you could write off all of web3 with that sentence

[8organicbits]

Their website is "backpack bang"? What a strange name, the last thing I want is for my backpack to "bang" when moving unknown goods across international borders!

[calgoo]

Looks like they are still active!

[oldgregg]

Anyone else remember when HackerNews had an adventurous libertarian ethos before the school marms infested the place with irrelevant and low vibrational commentary?

[Havoc]

Eric Schmidt echoed similar sentiment in his recent interview. Basically do it, if startup fails then it doesn’t matter. If it succeeds then lawyers can sort it out.

[arrosenberg]

He would know. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...

[SoftTalker]

Also in these "gig" type companies, the people who are actually breaking the laws are the workers, e.g. the drivers or the homeowners in the case of Uber and AirBnB. The startup is the enabler, yes, but they will try to throw their workers under the bus before they take responsibility themselves. They don't own the cars, they don't own the properties, and they are most likely in a far-away jurisdiction.

[ath3nd]

SBF and Elizabeth Holmes would like a word.

And hopefully everyone else "successful" having the morals of a greedy chimpanzee follows the same fate as those swindlers. Whatever happened to doing good by people and society (or at least pretending to)?

[atq2119]

Should inciting others to commit crimes be in itself a crime? Certainly, if somebody influential enough does it, it has the potential to destabilize our society with catastrophic results.

[lisnake]

Didn't work for Elizabeth Holmes

[santiagobasulto]

Which makes total sense for consumers as well. If the startup succeeds is because consumers are finding value in it. Uber is the best example. Uber is ilegal only in countries with deep corruption where taxi unions can make legislators ignore their constituents. Uber (and any other car sharing app) is the best solution for me as a consumer compared to the traditional old school taxi service.

[yonran]

Ironically for a question about antitrust price fixing you just named two incumbent government-sanctioned cartels (zoning and taxi medallions) that restrict supply and keep prices high. They would be illegal if private companies made them.

[jmward01]

> They would be illegal if private companies made them.

A lot of things governments do would be illegal if private companies did them. Are you arguing that governments shouldn't have special abilities that companies can't have? Should every road be owned by a company? Should the police report to Amazon instead of the local municipality where you may actually have a say in how they are run?

We give governments additional powers because they, at least nominally, answer to citizens and society. Companies have no such responsibility.

[digging]

> They would be illegal if private companies made them.

Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies. Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?

[swatcoder]

That's not ironic. Governments and private companies are not the same kind of entities. They have different roles, different roots of legitimacy, different forms of accountability, different operational objectives, and carry different expectations.

[failuser]

I did not say those were even good laws. Many people go to jail for breaking bad laws though.

And the government can establish monopolies on many things, my private nuclear weapons startup did not get much traction either.

[ein0p]

Zoning, ok, but yellow cabs are now often cheaper than Uber. Last time I took a ride from the airport the difference was not small, like 50%.

[fwip]

Many things a government does would be illegal if private companies did them. For example, prison, the draft, and taxes. The government is allowed to do it because we (as a society) believe it's better for the government to do these things than private individuals or companies.

[insane_dreamer]

> essentially illegal taxi and illegal hotel services

I don't know about Uber, but Airbnb deflects this by saying they are not in fact a hotel service. Rather hosts are hotel services, and Airbnb is simply a discovery platform matching buyers and sellers. It's up to an individual host to make sure they are complying with local laws including whether their city or district allows an individual to rent out their house or a room in it without a hotel license (this varies from city to city). In this way Airbnb (fairly or unfairly) pushes the burden and liability onto the hosts.

I believe this is also a huge reason why Uber doesn't want to classify drivers as employees because then it is the taxi service, whereas it could argue that the drivers are each operating their own taxi service and Uber is just a discovery and payment platform.

[failuser]

I’m pretty sure an assassination marketplace would not fly under the same legal pretense. The platform won’t do the killing, right?

If hotel or taxi lobby was more powerful or caught the threat early on AirBnB and Uber would have been destroyed.

[Manuel_D]

Taxi medallions were (and AFAIK still are) required to respond to people hailing a taxi from the street. It is not required to book a ride via phone or internet. Uber and Lyft drivers never needed taxi medallions.

[whimsicalism]

uber: mostly not technically because the key thing is that they are not soliciting rides from the street, was my understanding.

airbnb had a much more legally tenuous start

[failuser]

Uber even had a whole program to thwart law enforcement attempts to investigate them called “greyball”. They knew what they are doing. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...