• Cricket@lemmy.zip
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      9 days ago

      I completely agree with your conclusion. Just to be clear, I was in no way saying that what Uber did and OpenAI does is OK. They both suck and should never be allowed to operate as they had and have. I don’t know if Uber was government corruption though, at least I had never heard it described as such. What I have heard is that they found loopholes in taxi laws around the world and employed a global army of lawyers exploit those loopholes.

        • Cricket@lemmy.zip
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          9 days ago

          Got it, thanks. My memory of how Uber was able to gain a foothold was a little different, but my memory of it was patchy anyway. My recollection was that they essentially said that Uber was not a taxi service. They sold it as just regular people offering to “share” a ride with someone else to an area that they were going to anyway. I have no doubt that heavy political contributions were part of their arsenal in their attack on the taxi industry and regulations, so I agree that this was government corruption. But I also recall that they also had armies of lawyers fighting at every level of government around the world to ram through the idea that this wasn’t a taxi service and shouldn’t be subject to taxi regulations. Maybe my memory is more patchy than I thought, or perhaps both things were true - government corruption and a legal war allowed them flourish.