[AnthonyMouse]

Using "empathy" as the reason to diminish the options of someone who has few to begin with is the oblivious cruelty of the political functionary.

If A and B are both bad but B is worse, and then you prohibit A because A is bad, what result do you expect? B is still worse than A and B is now their only option.

This is the age distribution of Uber drivers:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/828981/ride-hailing-serv...

More than 70% are over the age of 50. Only 1.5% are 30 or under. Approximately 90% of Uber drivers are doing it part-time. These are not naive kids being taken advantage of, they're older people who want a little extra income and to get out of the house.

The people claiming that this is abuse are the people who want to sustain a taxi medallion cartel. Competition from bored retirees interferes with that, so they demonize it. This is how we get bad laws, regulatory capture and cost disease.

You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

[palata]

> You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

[AnthonyMouse]

> By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

Who is making them work there? Is there any place in the world where Uber is the only source of employment?

> With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

The incumbents define opportunities for competing drivers as abuse and then want to prohibit the competition from doing that. This is straightforwardly taking away those opportunities from others to benefit the incumbents.

If it was actually abuse, the people nevertheless choosing it as the best of their available alternatives would have to be in a position where all of their other alternatives are also abusive. This typically happens when there is some kind of serious monopolization or regulatory capture in the local economy. In that case you can forget about the original company for a minute and redirect all your efforts to addressing that, because then you're on a sinking ship and if you don't stop taking on water it's not going to matter how you position the deck chairs.

Whereas if there are non-abusive alternatives and people are willfully choosing the "abusive" one, something doesn't add up and you shouldn't assume that it's them rather than you who doesn't understand their situation.

[palata]

Regulate how much Uber/Lyft can take from the drivers for merely providing a matching app.

[AnthonyMouse]

That isn't what most of the proposals or actual laws to "regulate Uber" do.

But let's consider your proposal. The first question to ask about any proposed rule is, what are people going to do in response to it? If you limit how much they can take for providing a matching app, they'll add some other feature to their service and charge for that. Or just break out the existing charge on the customer's statement to list something else they're already providing. Your purpose wasn't to prohibit anyone from offering services other than matching to livery drivers and customers, right?

The next question to ask is, what problem are you trying to solve? Are their margins too high? Uber's net margin for 2024 was ~10%, and that was the first year it was even a positive number.