Comment by swatcoder
5 months ago
That's not ironic. Governments and private companies are not the same kind of entities. They have different roles, different roots of legitimacy, different forms of accountability, different operational objectives, and carry different expectations.
It’s ironic that in response to a question about price fixing, failuser brought up other companies that were formed to circumvent government price fixing, and in his examples the governments doing the price fixing were supposedly the good guys!
In the case of Uber, they successfully broke up the taxi cartel since the state PUC ruled that ride hail is a separate category.
In the case of Airbnb, according to their founding story they were created to help economize on space because rents were high in San Francisco due to zoning. Although they made a useful service, they did not succeed in reducing rents because the underlying zoning is still the constraint that keeps rents high.