[burningion]

No, these are not only the laws they allegedly broke.

They created a project named Greyball to identify law enforcement and mislead them.

They created a kill switch for the event of a government raid to gather evidence.

They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps.

They tracked journalists and politicians...

The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber

[ok_dad]

The best thing to ever happen to corpo scum was that social media took over most of the news. Now there’s no trusted journalists to write a big article about this kind of stuff, instead folks just defend the corpo scum’s actions and spread lies for them, while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

[rbanffy]

It would have worked if we didn’t find out the hard way a lot of social media and alternative news outlets weren’t even scummier.

We need good journalism courses with heavy emphasis on ethics and the importance of journalism to democracy.

We also need a way to punish entertainment that passes as journalism (maybe fewer legal protections) and to incentive actual journalism (and find a decent way to distinguish between the two).

[AnthonyMouse]

Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have any reason to do unless they were being targeted by a media campaign or captured government. There is also some dispute about whether some of those even happened or are just mischaracterizations from the media campaign.

It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.

[ok_dad]

Move the goalposts any more and they’re going to be outside the stadium. What laws matter to you? I agree there are shit laws but why can uber break them with impunity but individuals are jailed for smoking some fun lettuce?

[AnthonyMouse]

The question you should be asking is, what do you want to do about it? Throw the people challenging the taxi cartels in prison, or get rid of the laws against fun lettuce?

[ok_dad]

Something else, I’m not sure what yet. Honestly, I’m not the best guy to ask but I know that I don’t want startups to continue breaking laws with impunity and I don’t want individuals to get imprisoned for stuff they do that isn’t affecting others in a meaningful way.

[AnthonyMouse]

There isn't really a something else. You have bad laws that are in practice only enforced against the little guy. You could demand they also be enforced against the big guy, but that's hard to do when they're bad laws, isn't really a great outcome because they're bad laws, and its primary benefit would be in service of calling attention to the flaw so the bad laws can be repealed. And then maybe you should just start there to begin with.

[BrenBarn]

That is partly true, but it's also true that vastly increased enforcement against the big guys would still be better than what we have now.

[opello]

Why isn't at least one of those things actually addressing (disbanding, regulating, whatever--left to people experienced in policy or with context to have some remediation plan) those taxi cartels' behavior?

[AnthonyMouse]

The argument is that getting rid of the bad laws is better than enforcing them more rigorously. This can be applied to the laws propping up the taxi medallion cartels as well as the ones prohibiting personal drug use. Then anyone (not just Uber) could compete with them and thereby disband the taxi cartels previously using those laws to constrain competition.

[opello]

I agree that removing bad laws is good. I think by introducing the second, culturally charged topic (1.) taxi cartels, 2.) recreational drugs) you diminish the possible interpretations of your perspective.

The other downstream conclusions make sense too, but the linkage is more opaque making it difficult to appreciate.

Also hard to acknowledge is--who decides which laws are "bad"? Generally, societal outcomes should test the efficacy (toward some comparably abstract societal good) of laws, which then prompts the legislature to do something between patting themselves on the back and authoring actually effective law.

[thwarted]

Because more money and special interests are behind fun lettuce smoking enforcement than local taxi companies could put behind protecting their own cartel from interlopers. If the taxi companies had more money to dump on politicians than is poured into drug enforcement, then the priorities would have changed.