There seems to be very little love for these bicycle companies and their aggressive and border-line illegal tactics of establishing themselves — i.e., it's not

There seems to be very little love for these bicycle companies and their aggressive and border-line illegal tactics of establishing themselves — i.e., it's not just petty vandalism and theft. People who normally wouldn't condone destruction of property appear to make an exception for these bicycle dumpers. The common approach these companies take is to try to establish their brand as the leading one in a large city, so that in time they can turn a profit due to their scale and dominance. To get there, they need to beat the competition first. Because this is a new type of enterprise and a novel use of public space, they simply start operating, and hope to persuade the local government of their merits in the course of operating their business. In a city like Amsterdam, where a bunch of these companies popped up overnight, this caused a sudden increase in the number of bicycles parked on the city streets (most people in Amsterdam already own their own beat-up city-bicycle which tends to be parked in front of their houses) that took on such a worrying scale that the municipal government banned them for now. These companies lost their bet in Amsterdam until regulation is in place, but they will continue to push their business model everywhere. What makes otherwise reasonable people irate is the way these companies are laying claim to our public streets without taking responsibility for the consequences. Their business model depends on smartphone apps that show users the nearest available bicycle, instead of having dedicated parking spaces for them. So as a consequence of this model, users leave their rented bicycles wherever they dismount, because it stops being their problem at that point, and the pickup trucks that gather these bicycles from inconvenient locations for repair and redistribution tend to leave them in places with a lot of pedestrian traffic, blocking the pedestrian paths in the process. People tend to not like it when local inhabitants can't pass through a street with a pram or a wheelchair without stepping onto the car lanes because someone dumped a bunch of brightly coloured rent-a-bikes on the footpath.