[Kalium]

One of the key advantages a large corporate model has over a small, local cooperative is the ability to effectively harness resources for shared infrastructure.

In the case of Uber and Lyft, that's all the technological infrastructure that goes into making the platforms work. This isn't a trivial amount of work that can be easily replicated by taxi companies or scrappy driver-owned coops, as attempts to do so have shown. As we're all familiar with, maintaining this infrastructure is also far from free or trivial.

Credit unions are an instructive example. Many offer membership in interoperative networks, but few are able to effectively compete with the customer-friendly offerings of big banks with centralized power structures. The ability to satisfy customers isn't some side-effect, it's a key goal. A localized organization that can't compete is worth nothing except as a cautionary tale.

With that in mind, I would say the organizational challenge of coops is thus: how to keep centralized infrastructure controlled by localized entities while being competitive with non-local entities.