FTA: "While the regulators discussed ways to clarify the legality of these apps, they also proposed guidelines that would effectively force Uber, a San Francisco start-up, to cease operations in the United States."
These regulations and agencies were created in response to a wildly different system of car-based transportation from decades ago, one where drivers, agencies, payments, customers, and misbehavior were all harder to track and punish. A gypsy cab could operate unsafely, mislead customers (especially out-of-town visitors), and disappear with cash: no recourse.
Uber and more generally the category of mobile-dispatched-and-paid transport are now so different from that past that the best approach will be to let them operate to see what happens. The fears about 'anyone in a basement' preying on consumers and then disappearing reflect a pre-internet, pre-mobile, pre-credit-card mentality and may not be relevant at all, except in the imagination of threatened incumbents and bureaucrats.
New restrictive guidelines, like those from this "International Association of Transportation Regulators" conference, should only be crafted in response to any actual abuses that materialize. Even then, they should only be deployed to the extent that the standard laws of consumer protection (implied warranties, truth-in-advertising, liability law, etc.) don't work, and competitive consumer choice (aided by their mobile devices) doesn't work.
(There used to be special informational failures in cab-dispatching that made the usual consumer protections not work well. Those failures have been solved with mobile/reputational dispatch-and-payment. Every person, car, dollar, and ride is now far more accountable, even without government regulation, than ever before.)
These regulations and agencies were created in response to a wildly different system of car-based transportation from decades ago, one where drivers, agencies, payments, customers, and misbehavior were all harder to track and punish. A gypsy cab could operate unsafely, mislead customers (especially out-of-town visitors), and disappear with cash: no recourse.
Uber and more generally the category of mobile-dispatched-and-paid transport are now so different from that past that the best approach will be to let them operate to see what happens. The fears about 'anyone in a basement' preying on consumers and then disappearing reflect a pre-internet, pre-mobile, pre-credit-card mentality and may not be relevant at all, except in the imagination of threatened incumbents and bureaucrats.
New restrictive guidelines, like those from this "International Association of Transportation Regulators" conference, should only be crafted in response to any actual abuses that materialize. Even then, they should only be deployed to the extent that the standard laws of consumer protection (implied warranties, truth-in-advertising, liability law, etc.) don't work, and competitive consumer choice (aided by their mobile devices) doesn't work.
(There used to be special informational failures in cab-dispatching that made the usual consumer protections not work well. Those failures have been solved with mobile/reputational dispatch-and-payment. Every person, car, dollar, and ride is now far more accountable, even without government regulation, than ever before.)