[johnsea]

I thought of a kind of a 'structural explotation', i.e a big corporation & customer vs. an individual driver. He/she has almost no defence if e.g. the rating is bad. If you need the money, you don't have the option to just jump ship. Of course I like people do their work well but this immediate consequences is not good and not social, there should be some shelter, like e.g. unions, a taxi company with collegues etc.

Government regulates a lot of things and if sensibly done, this is imho a good thing and protects the citiziens. A completely deregulated taxi industry would probably bring a lot of overcrowding, put a lot of stress to the drivers and their salaries would fall even lower (they are not high (in Berlin)).

I hope that I'm not wrong, but I've never heard that here in Germany we have something like $700 000 taxi medaillons as in New York. With such conditions a deregulation is probably a good thing, but here?