Your list is preposterous. Even if you take all your other items at face value, you make it sound like "circumventing cellphone texting charges" is breaking the law or something, as if ridiculous texting charges are set up for the good of anyone besides big telcos.

It's not preposterous, it's exactly right. SMS text messages were a something like $15bn industry before whatsapp got between them and the customers, and that has value.

The list is preposterous because the title was "I think I see a pattern", and all the other examples given were breaking laws or some other nefarious goal (and I'd emphasize those other examples were clearly taken from the point of view that these companies were doing something bad). The implication was that "circumventing texting charges" was somehow stealing from telcos.

What about imessage?

Only on iOS. Doesn't have the same impact as WhatsApp.

Of those description, whatsapp is the one that's actually the classic "how capitalism is supposed to work": provide a comparable or better service for a lower price.

Amazon's era of sales tax evasion is mostly over. And if anyone is monetising copyright infringement it's not Google (who are somewhat conscientious about this after some lawsuits) but Tumblr (literally made of copyright infringing photos)

Google (meaning Google.com, the search engine) is a flagrant copyright violator and the only reason they weren't shut down is that they became too important too fast for the judges to be willing to rule anything other than "Yes fair use works for everything they do, please don't hurt me for breaking the internet". Many smaller groups were shut down by Lady Justice for behavior very similar to Google's.

Lot of this is that Amazon has a physical nexus in most states or wants to. (And the situation with affiliates is murky.) So not much point in resisting at this point at their scale. Almost no other company collects sales tax for out-of-state sales where they don't have a physical retail location although buyers are theoretically on the hook for reporting it during tax season.

You mean the Sears-Roebuck era of tax evasion.

I meant something very specific: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/the-holiday-is-over-amazon-w...

(The era of Amazon posting things from Jersey to UK and other destinations for similar reasons ended ages ago)

I was also restricting myself to the question of sales taxes; tax evasion/avoidance among the internet tech monoliths is a wider question.

Or less cynically:

WhatsApp: cheap plentiful messaging

Airbnb: cheap plentiful vacation rentals

Uber: cheap plentiful taxis

Amazon: cheap plentiful stuff

Facebook: ... umm i'm sure there's something here ...

Google: cheap plentiful access to information

All of these disrupt the slow-moving complacent dinosaurs of the past.

And one of the interesting questions for me is "where does 'cheap' come from"?

In the case of WhatsApp, it came from telco monopolies overcharging for a particular use of data. I'm certainly ok with that.

And I was initially excited about Airbnb, rideshare, etc, because some of the cheap comes from finding underutilized resources (an apartment that happened to be empty for a few weeks, people who were going somewhere anyhow) and putting them to work.

But I find the second-order effects fascinating. Certainly some of Airbnb and Uber's cheapness comes from dodging regulation and shifting costs onto other people.

"Privatize the gains, socialize the losses" is undeniably a lucrative business strategy, but it's not one I particularly want to celebrate.

> "Privatize the gains, socialize the losses" is undeniably a lucrative business strategy, but it's not one I particularly want to celebrate.

This doesn't describe anything that AirBnB or Uber are doing.

Taxis were expensive and horrible because governments created artificial scarcity via taxi medallion systems. They were "socializing the gains", to build off your aphorism.

Uber re-privatized the gains by circumventing this ridiculous system, and we're all much better for it.

"Socializing the losses" refers to groups getting bailed out on taxpayer dime when they fail, and nothing even resembling that has happened with AirBnB or Uber.

Taxis were mostly horrible because of pre-mobile-phone dispatch systems and expectations. That would have gotten fixed with or without Uber, although Uber certainly did push it along.

But taxi medallion systems served a number of purposes. One of the big ones is reasonable regulation of taxi and driver quality. Another was keeping supply and demand balanced at a level where people didn't have to cut corners on things like taxi maintenance just to survive, which helped keep taxi fleets safe. A third was setting up a reasonably livable wage for career taxi drivers. A fourth, at least in some cities, was creating a de-facto retirement system: since drivers had dibs on medallions, they could invest and create an asset that would fund their retirement. A fifth was creating a revenue stream for cities to that helps pay for regulatory and road costs. Those are off the top of my head; I'm sure there were more.

Now instead a lot of those costs are borne by other people. Uber has shifted capital and maintenance costs entirely away from cab companies and on to random people desperate enough to drive for Uber. Losses are no longer the problem of the cab company, but individuals. When those drivers go bankrupt, society bears the costs. When those drives use public assistance [1], society bears the costs. When they retire and we make up for their lost retirement savings, society bears the costs. And that's to say nothing of the direct and indirect societal costs that come from more traffic.

Similar issues come up with Airbnb. E.g., if you thought you were living next to a neighbor and now are dealing with an illegal one-unit hotel in your building, you are experiencing a loss. If the apartment you rent out is trashed because somebody is running an illegal business out of it [2], you experience significant loss. When rent goes up because people are illegally converting housing to de-facto hotel stock, that is a socialized loss with privatized gains.

I'm not even saying this is necessarily worse. As with the bankruptcy system as a whole, it can sometimes be overall better for society to pay for something. But we shouldn't sweep this stuff under the rug.

[1] E.g., https://uberpeople.net/threads/you-may-qualify-for-governmen...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/01/airbnb-nightmare-homeowners-...

Note that none of the reasons you listed for the medallion system was "for getting paying customers efficiently from A to B". They're all secondary objectives that have little to do with serving the customer. If it was not the government, medallion system could be called a protection racket. That's why Uber succeeded.

Not really. Even if we accept your frame of analysis, which begins the moment somebody starts a trip and ends the moment they're done, then regulating taxi quality, driver quality, passenger safety, and paying for effective roads are all relevant factors.

But if the system isn't sustainable, then in the long term customers don't get what they want. So when we're designing society-level systems, we need to think about society-scale sustainability.

Personally, instead of our hodgepodge of retirement and health insurance systems, I think we should just fund a strong safety net out of taxes. That minimizes barriers to entrepreneurship and avoids distortions. But that's not what America had when the medallion system was being developed, so we got what we got. You can certainly propose a change to that, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to explain how you'll solve the problems the existing system solves, or at least be honest that you're not solving them.

> One of the big ones is reasonable regulation of taxi and driver quality.

I can only imagine that someone who rarely or never travels would say something like this. The main reason I switched to uber is that taxis are universally horrible, both in terms of drivers and vehicles. It's gotten much better since uber forced them to compete, but they still generally suck.

So maybe you're right, and that was the reason for taxi medallions; but guess what? It didn't work.

> Uber has shifted capital and maintenance costs entirely away from cab companies and on to random people desperate enough to drive for Uber.

Again, this is something that I can't imagine hearing from someone who actually uses Ubers on a regular basis. Most Uber drivers I've talked to love the platform, and a good portion of them are e.g. students working a side job, none of them "desperate" people.

It is frustrating that you ignore the meat of what I wrote, pick on a couple of things you can object to, and carry on carping. I'll try one more reply and see how it goes.

> I can only imagine that someone who rarely or never travels would say something like this.

Your imagination is poor. I've lived on 4 continents and am on an extended trip even as I write this.

We're talking about different kinds of regulation. You apparently care about things being shiny; most regulation, though, is about setting a minimum bar.

In the early, high-growth days of something, regulation is rarely useful because everybody's on their best behavior. It becomes more important when things settle down into a relatively steady state. Then, the incentive to shave nickels and dimes can come out elsewhere. E.g., taxis face significant safety inspections and maintenance requirements because when you use a car as a commercial vehicle, you put a lot more miles on it and you are more likely face safety issues.

We don't yet see these problems with UberX because it has only been going for a few years, and because Uber has a strong incentive to keep from becoming an obvious disaster until growth slows and revenue gains come more from exploiting their market position.

> Most Uber drivers I've talked to love the platform

Gosh, might they have some incentive to only say happy things to you? Gosh, might there be some selection bias in your sample? Gosh, might people not talk about their pain and fears to random strangers?

>Uber re-privatized the gains by circumventing this ridiculous system, and we're all much better for it.

Who are those all? Taxi drivers or the general public? I'd rather have professional, decently paid, taxi drivers instead of amateur hour weekend drivers making minimum wage at the expense of yet another working class job.

Actually in India, I am really grateful for Uber. Previously talking to an auto rikshaw or taxi is pretty painful. They are rude, not reliable, charge a lot if you don't know the city or area. Also atleast from my talking to lot of Uber/Ola drivers is that they are earning a lot compared to their previous taxi service. So to answer your question, both drivers and public.

Earning more isn't very true now though.

Did you ever use a taxi before uber? Nothing you said is grounded in reality. Taxi drivers are usually extremely unprofessional, underpaid, and horrific drivers. It's actually gotten much better since Uber came around.

>Did you ever use a taxi before uber?

Almost every day.

People really need to specify a geographical context for discussions of Uber; I've no doubt that wyager and coldtea are both reporting their experiences, but taxis are necessarily a very local service. Clearly some cities just have really bad taxis.

Finally, sense!

In London, Uber is a taxi service. The people driving for Uber are taxi drivers, with taxi driver licenses [1], and the vehicles they drive are taxis, with taxi licenses [2]. The experience is therefore much the same. The difference arises from three things: Uber has a nice app, whereas legacy taxi offices are a shambles; Uber drivers are desperate to keep their star rating up, and so might be nicer; Uber subsidises the whole operation to win market share. The app is the only significant difference, in my experience.

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...

[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...

Yeah same in the US. Honestly there was an under supply of cabs. The cars themselves were all uniform and weren't very clean. Cabbie drivers weren't very well paid ever. It was often difficult to pay with a credit or debit card...Uber and Lyft put so much competitive pressure on the system that cabs are nicer now.

Airbnb socializes the costs by transfering them to the flat owners (cleaning etc.), and Uber to the drivers (fuel, maintenance etc.)

In terms of Airbnb socializing costs, it's not the flat owner who is taking on some costs and some profit, but their neighbours, who bear the costs of noise and reduced security and community.

That's not what socializing means. Socializing means using government to redistribute costs to the population at large via taxes. Entering a voluntary private agreement where you have some obligations is not "socialization".

It's funny that facebook is amongst the biggest on that list, when they don't actually seem to provide anything of use to the end user.

cheap plentiful stalking?

It's weird, you hit the nail on the head in your first line, then skip the essentials on the next line.

WhatsApp: circumvent cellphone texting charges, making texting cheaper

Airbnb: circumvent hotel laws, making staying anywhere cheaper

Uber: circumvent taxi laws, making taxis and flexible transport cheaper

Amazon: circumvent state taxes (and VAT, until recently, and still the case in Europe, Australia and I'm sure many other jurisdictions), making getting mail-order goods cheaper

PS for Amazon: and also making mail-order a great deal faster.

PPS for Amazon: also cut out many middlemen to make things cheaper.

Facebook: make advertising to particular groups, accurately identified, a LOT cheaper

Google: Make it a lot cheaper to find things online.

But Why stay in tech ?

Aldi + their discounter competitors: Make groceries a lot cheaper by cutting out the middleman

GE, in their day: Make lighting and anything that could be done cheaper electrically a lot cheaper. Or possible at all in the first place.

VW, in their day: make owning a car a lot cheaper.

GDF/Suez: make transporting goods from Europe to Asia a lot faster (but mostly cheaper).

Keep in mind Jevon's paradox. Cheaper does not just mean cheaper, as in less dollars. It also means that whatever becomes cheaper becomes more ubiquitous. Faster. Becomes accessible for more people, either in difficult geographies, or poor, or ... It also means those things become feasible to use for various purposes that they couldn't be used for before. It means a lot more of said good/service will get used. And so on and so forth.

You want to make $1 million ? Become great in a particular subject, and consult.

You want to make $10-$100 million ? Start a company with a niche product, and do it really well.

Want to make $100 million - $1 billion ? Start a company and bribe the government, so that it either pays you directly or forces loads of people to pay for your services (lots of these in Washington and Brussels)

You want to make $1-$10 billion ? Make some stupid ubiquitous product cheaper. Think the most moronic normal things in existence. Breakfast cereal. Grapes. Web search.

I do not see it, i just see huge value to society with each.

As an aside, "I don't see X, therefore X is irrelevant/meaningless" is an argument whose relevance hinges on the speaker being all-seeing, all-knowing. That's always seemed an odd take to me. When somebody sees something that I don't, my goal is to see it.

You can't just slap the word "circumvent" onto a bunch of vastly different concepts and expect us to believe they are all similar.

One of those is not like the others.