The Austin City council members that promoted the ban had received campaign contributions from the Texas Taxi Lobby. It was never about having verified names, it was about making money for Taxis.

Don't mess with Taxis.

Sure there are some things you can't legislate, but this isn't one of them.

Uber and Lyft simply don't want to do this because it threatens their profit margins. It makes just as much sense to blame the companies for this situation.

> Uber and Lyft simply don't want to do this because it threatens their profit margins.

You do understand how silly that sounds right? They want to protect their profit margins because... they're businesses! Uber and Lyft both said beforehand that they'd leave if they were forced abide by the silly measures put in place by the Austin silly council, so no, it does not make sense to blame them.

Yes, it does.

Many nations have the reasonable law "Anyone has the right to property, given that the property is only used for the benefit of society as a whole".

Looking at it from that perspective, Uber trying to get a monopoly by avoiding full insurance, by using predatory pricing, etc, is very bad.

For the customer, the ideal would be a hundred seperate taxi companies, independent.

But all providing a simple web API to book, and then others could create webinterfaces and apps to interact with those APIs. Similar to taxi.eu or mytaxi.

This wasn't just lawmakers, there was a chance at the polls.