Comment by fooker
7 hours ago
Your story makes the point that the nonprofit app only worked under new government regulations and could not survive in the free market?
I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.
Americans when foreign goverment does literally anything: "no free market"
Americans when their government blasts their companies full of money for random unnecessary defense projects: "so free, much market, wow"
Enforcing laws, like requiring background checks, makes the market MORE free
The nonprofit app worked because the existing players didn't want to do required background checks on drivers and exited the market to make the local government look bad. When that tactic failed, they came back and used some of their VC billions to recapture the market by artificially lowering the price of their services. That's not at all "free market", that's buying your way to a monopoly (or more technically an oligopoly in this case)
It wasn't a free market, it was an anticompetitive market