[adventured]

They're not facing strong competition, they're facing extremely weak competition (Lyft is heading toward bankruptcy and can't even manage to sell itself off). They aren't going to lose significant market share, they're going to end up with a modest monopoly, replicating the positions acquired by: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, PayPal, Intel, Cisco, etc. The same story plays out over and over again in tech, and it does so for very obvious reasons.

Who else is threatening Uber in the US for example? Nobody. Who is going to spend billions to take the market away from Uber? Nobody.

[thesimon]

>Who else is threatening Uber in the US for example?

Taxis? Car manufacturers?

>Who is going to spend billions to take the market away from Uber?

Doesn't look like it's a very profitable market Uber is operating in, so why should anyone spend billions to do so?

[ruipgil]

The competition may not come directly from technology companies, but from car companies. Tesla might be one of them.

[cookiecaper]

>The same story plays out over and over again in tech, and it does so for very obvious reasons.

Yes, and that reason is anti-competitive supercharged intellectual property laws, plus anti-competitive obsolete computer access laws that can't tell the difference between a parcel of land on someone's farm and a network-attached server. Together, these laws make it virtually impossible to break the grip of ingrained players.

Instead of competing on the merit of their offering, big internet companies only need to take the basic steps that qualify them for those legal protections, like a non-sensical Terms of Use that, if read literally, would ban any access at all. These companies thus conspire to use the law to prevent the use of technical solutions to make switching costs reasonable for consumers.

(PayPal deals with an extra type of regulation, and even its founders have said it would be impossible to start a new PayPal today given the current state of financial regulation.)

We should consider how much money is being monopolized by copyright and ask ourselves, as a society, if that's really proportional to the value provided by granting said monopoly. I would say that copyright's constitutional purpose of "promoting progress in Science and the Arts" is actually being impeded by the massive, virtually unlimited (effectively "forever minus one day") monopoly that copyright now represents.

[cookiecaper]

Uber may find itself hyper-extended. I wonder if a startup that provided a white-label on-demand ride hailing system wouldn't do better, at least in markets where taxi use is small.

[sharemywin]

groupon couldn't make it work. This seems more like hundreds of local markets and not 1 big market. And that company that has only women drivers for women passengers seems like it might be able to carve out a niche. and if it gets to profitable what's to stop grub hub, task rabbit or another deliver company to make a run at the market.