Cass Sunstein sees Uber – the app that connects people to luxury car service – as an existential threat to “taxi dinosaurs,” if it can get past the various regulatory hurdles that keep popping up:
[T]here is an important place for rules designed to promote safety and to prevent fraud or deception. But regulation of the taxi industry goes far beyond those goals. That regulation is a dinosaur; it should become extinct. Uber’s innovative approach raises a still more fundamental question. In countless domains, people have to spend a great deal of time and effort on searching and matching. For auto repairs, home repairs, household help, tutors and even child care, it can be difficult to find a convenient and reliable service. Wouldn’t it be a great improvement, indeed an amazing boon to people (and the economy as a whole), if a wide range of services, available on simple apps, emerged to decrease the costs of search?
Because of the happy combination of new technologies and private entrepreneurship, that possibility is getting more realistic every day. We shouldn’t allow pointless regulatory barriers, and self-interested private groups, to delay its time of arrival.
Previous Dish on Uber here.
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