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How much rent would one of those apps be allowed to seek? Or would they just be run out of benevolence?
This article is a good time to plug LibreTaxi: "Free and open source alternative to Uber/Lyft connecting passengers and drivers. LibreTaxi makes ridesharing affordable by getting rid of the third party between passengers and drivers. Negotiate the price before the ride is confirmed, pay cash upon arrival. 1-minute hiring for all drivers." https://libretaxi.org/
Uber solves this by automating the payments. If you pay cash then there is no guarantee you'll get paid.
But what would happen if such a technique were to become legal and ubiquitous?
Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant capital, because they know that as soon as the company becomes successful enough to become a target, there will be other companies that will swoop in and attempt to exploit its technology so they themselves don't need to invest significant capital.
The damage to the market would be severe.
That said, as a fan of distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism I am also a huge fan of cooperatives, and I think worker-owned co-ops can be successful in the ride-sharing space without needing to resort to such tactics.
He has it exactly backwards. Taxicabs would routinely racially profile passengers.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/nyregion/danny-glover-say...
For example, he says "Uber...allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities" Does he really not know the long history of cab drivers not stopping for black passengers? This has been frontpage news on multiple occasions, most famously with Danny Glover. Multiple friends have told me how much Uber/Lyft have improved this situation.
Meanwhile, Doctorow's meta platform idea literally steals revenue from people who have added tremendous value not only at time of transaction but after via the reputational system and other customer service functions. Nevermind that it would be trivial for Uber to squash this via cancellation fees and driver derankings.
If you want to form a co-op app, go for it. But find a better thought leader than Doctorow.
The main challenge to successful (i.e., market-dominating) cooperatively-owned platforms like the ones Cory wants is that usually there are no incentives that motivate individuals to dedicate their lives and souls in the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms for the benefit of others. The exceptions, including successful projects like GNU and Linux, tend to be led by rather unique…
Creating a federated platform is technically quite feasible. E-mail, the Web, Usenet (before it was overrun by spam anyway), IRC... plus these days, stuff like PeerTube and Mastodon. Sure, not every one of these is "successful", but the trend is there.
Email, the Web, and Usenet were all created before the modal HN user was born. Of those three, Usenet is basically not a going concern (beyond paid binary newsgroups for piracy, honestly). The Web is increasingly siloed off. What federation there is exists largely thanks to commercial CDNs and peering, not user-facing federation that benefits user freedom.
I'm not sure IRC was ever motivated as a federated model. It's true users can run an IRC server, but the main advantage of IRS compared to previous attempts at multi-user chatting (whether asynchronous like BBSes or synchronous like early chat platforms) was that it allowed confederation of servers into server networks. But also my impression is certainly that IRC is moribund with many long-time users having pivoted to Slack or Discord, both centralized.
Rather, where federation is growing, it's largely recent, fringe experiments. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, let a thousand flowers bloom. Mastodon might end up working out for some definition of working out. I doubt PeerTube will.
But in any case, it's more accurate to say that some of the early internet was built on decentralized platforms, some of which were federated, and that recently some tech enthusiasts have recently written some interesting, maybe promising federated platforms. There is definitely not a trend toward federation.
The closest thing we have to a meta-service is Meta-Elsevier, more popularly known as Sci-Hub, which works so well simply because it doesn't care about legality. It's hosted outside the US on a slowly changing list of TLDs, and so it doesn't have to worry about any form of copyright law, not just the DMCA. I think if you wanted to build more services like this, you'd have to go this approach: instead of building an a…
Users jailbreaking their device and getting a specific app from a non-official/non-preinstalled app store is not convenient.
> Today, DRM is used to force people with artificial pancreases to buy proprietary insulin Wow, that seems especially evil.
It shouldn't be surprising that companies will do this if they can. There was an episode of Doctor Who not too long ago where employees on a space station had to buy oxygen from the company store.
If they had such a great coop going, I don't understand why they went back to Lyft/Uber?
1. Uber/Lyft went to the state to get the regulations overturned in a bit of venue shopping. They don't have to do fingerprinting. Happens a lot around here.
2. He failed to mention Austin Taxi Co-op. Some old hippies got together and helped form a normal Taxi company but made it owned by the drivers. It has an adequate but clunky app that is slowly getting better. They grabbed about 2/3s of the regular taxi drivers.
We won't really know how the ride-share market plays out until the subsidy goes away. It reminds me of when Standard Oil would go into town, undercut the local gas station until it fold, and then recoup the cost by raising prices. It is one of the things that the Antitrust laws were specifically designed to stop.