What likely annoys these people the most is that their little game is being called out. Regulation has its place, that is not stifling competition and restricting people from having jobs
This is an aspect that Silcon-Valley-style technology platforms have no apparent interest in supporting. For example, as time progresses Adsense might sign up more and more publisher capacity, yet that pushes down the income and discourages respectable publishers from using the service.
You go from a fairly well respected public service, to something that's got a nice brand and run by virtual slaves.
On the topic of self driving cars, full saturation is at least a couple of decades away.
Those are grand words for defending a taxi company that uses an app with driver + passenger ratings as basis for arguing that it is not a taxi company and that it shouldn't need to employ actual drivers.
Are you sure you didn't think about copyright law or investor state settlements laws when you wrote your comment?
Let's imagine that there's a bad driver — nothing horrible enough to be newsworthy, but just bad manners, bad routes, stuff like that. Let's imagine that he operated at an individual taxi park. This means that to provide a feedback to authority, the user would have to spend his time to call the company, to "snitch" about the driver. Would someone do it just to say that "the driver wasn't especially bad, but I would prefer better in the future"? Actually, I think yes, they would, but the probability of this is much slower than a user casually clicking 3 stars icon after the ride. And when you have less data points (customer support calls vs star rating actions), your information is worse has more noise in it. So, your decision making about hiring/firing drivers is worse. This is an argument about size.
And the argument about motivation — I think it's more or less obvious. Let's say your taxi driver has a city-issued beautiful plate in his cab. Do you even know who to call after he loads you off at a wrong street? Do you think they will be working at 11pm on Friday? Do you think they will be responsive and appreciative of the situation? Well, I assume that you interacted with bureaucrats at least once in your life, so the questions are really rhetorical.
These are examples about only one component of the trust issue, customer support and detection of bad performers, but mechanisms like this would work in other situations too.
PS: My response to rating systems is to generally give everyone 1 or 2 stars. Otherwise you end up with https://xkcd.com/1098/ making the whole thing pointless.
Also: end up, they're, response, rating, thing
Anyone who does that is doing something so stupid that it should be undermined.
Maybe this is the actual market rate for the service being provided, and not that people value it less.
Answer: No. Not at all.
Now what? Vote everybody out because they didn't let Uber/Lyft into my city? Cool. Then what? Shall every 4 years I vote everyone out of office to solve my one or two top issues? Great. I can now change things I don't like at a rate of less than one thing per year. Maybe a full issue per year if I'm super lucky.
It's not as sensitive as riding in a stranger car with no information about him whatsoever. But the basic idea is the same: we have to be honest and take in account the whole system when comparing.
Please use factual information if you're going to converse. You have more information on an Uber driver than a taxi driver. Picture, licence number, accessible GPS location and drivers rating.
For example, anyone who's seen more of NYC than just JFK airport and Times Square knows that that city has plenty of unlicensed rides available. This was true long before uber: white cars whose driver will only say "do you need a taxi?", and dollar-vans are everywhere. Yet, even though they offer an identical service to a licensed cab, people value them far less and fares are often 1/4 what's paid for a yellow taxi.
When it's an officially licensed taxi, you trust that their fares are regulated, your driver isn't a violent criminal, and that their vehicle's in safe working order. This is the real value uber brings: geolocation and well-designed apps are nice frills, but ultimately people are deciding more and more that they trust a business with a rating system for drivers + passengers, upfront rates (even if they vary), and GPS so in the unlikely event you are detained, you can be found.
Seriously, unless you're a lawyer, I have no idea why you'd go around debating what's legal or illegal. Instead, as citizens, we should look at the regulations we have and ask if they still serve to protect people as they once did, or if they now exist to protect political and business interests.