For academics I think this is fine, the whole job is to look for new extensions of the law. But it shows how very far we are from any kind of basis for "stopping tech."
Gonna be hard to achieve consensus around "raising fares and lowering driver pay" which is the opposite of what Uber did.
"Uber showed that venture predation works. Uber raised around $24 billion from private investors and used it to subsidize cheaper fares for riders and higher pay for drivers. Uber quickly crushed the taxi companies and acquired a dominant share of the combined taxi-and-ridehailing market.27 But it never developed a superior product or cost efficiency. Lyft, other ridehailing startups, and even taxi companies developed similar apps. Uber had to keep up its below-cost pricing to maintain its market share. In each of the three years before its IPO, Uber racked up losses of $3 billion or more.29 Uber reassured investors by explaining that, once it became dominant, it would be able to raise prices and recoup its losses. In its IPO roadshow, Uber’s executives
told investors that they expected the company to earn an adjusted profit."
...
"We concede that the “millennial lifestyle subsidy” was fun."
...
Then a lot of handwaving. But no victims other than bad high margin businesses. (There's a theoretical driver that doesn't realize the high pay won't last forever and buys a car, but he can sell it no? And he could read the news about his livelihood and learn that his high pay is at risk).
Btw, you can still take taxis. It'll cost more and pre uber they were very surly or wouldn't show when you called them. The only "regulate Uber" consequence will be higher ride costs and lower paid drivers.
Amazon operates on very tight margins in it's retail business. The ideal case is lots of competition, which would lead to uh... very tight margins among competitive firms. Amazon is just smart enough to get ahead of that. And I think their long term goal has been to operate at such a low cost structure that they have a durable advantage in cost. And then to pour back all their capital back into lowering their cost structure.
So why stop them? In order to subsidize the higher cost company, their private jets and sexual harassment lawsuits?
Capital is very easy to get in 2023. We are not in the time when capital is so difficult to get that you'd need a 2 generation family firm just to build a single factory. At that point spending 5 years to crush your competitor might have made sense. But now it's limited to monopoly markets like cable, and cell phone service. And it might indeed be useful to create more competition there.
Unlike Amazon I think Uber isn't likely to be a great business. There is just no cost structure advantage being built. So they'll either operate on low margins forever or they'll raise prices and we'll get competition in the space of a few years. In either case I would not want to hold Uber stock right now.