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Uber will pay over $272 million to Australian taxi drivers to compensate them for lost income because it entered the Australian market.
The Australian legal system is a unique beast. I thought enforcing a link tax was unusual but this takes the cake.
@carnage4life it relates to the fact that when they started they operated illegally, both from a regulatory and tax standpoint. Hence unfair competition leading to lost revenue.
Now they are licensed and have to collect sales tax. And uber rides are now basically the same as a cab fare.
The taxi industry was very corrupt, and due for a shake up; there was a local startup player doing just that (but legally; it was called gocatch). Uber's entry also killed them by replacing one corrupt taxi operator for another!
@carnage4life fur toother to that post, this was in the news today
https://www.abc.net.au/nerws/2024-04-02/go-catch-taxi-app-uber-supreme-court/103657412
I worked at Paypal in the product team when gocatch started, and they basically built the whole Uber experience but with regular taxis. You said where you wanted to go, it connected you with a driver, you could message them, you had a map of where they were, and you paid for the ride through the app (the PayPal bit.)
It was a massively better experience than the taxi companies offered, and it was completely legal. The taxi cartels were so worried they did a massive disinformation PR blitz about how gocatch was dangerous.
And Uber killed them through illegal activity. Genuine innovation smothered by VC funded techbro enshittification.
@carnage4life In Australia, taxis sucked prior to Uber and friends, but Uber went about it illegally at first.
If you prefer video or dislike paywalls, there's a bit more (possibly one-sided) dissection from #ABCAustralia at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD383gdJkME
@carnage4life To say nothing of the government shakedown of Meta for journalism they don't want.
In many ways US companies act as if Australia is home turf and that's not a universal point of view here or there. Will never forgive Redhat for closing a certmonger support ticket for ITAR reasons.