> Why have 20% of Taxi revenue (or whatever it is) leave the country if basically all of the service is provided in country, and the internet taxi company takes

> Why have 20% of Taxi revenue (or whatever it is) leave the country if basically all of the service is provided in country, and the internet taxi company takes the large cut over a sustained period through a combination of first-mover advantage an network effects? Because the value proposition for a service like Uber is the technology to efficiently broker transactions between riders and drivers (and hopefully we can avoid the predictable digression that this brokerage is trivial). The aforementioned 20% pays for that technology while the other 80% pays for the cost of the ride (the driver's time, fuel, car mileage, etc). Also, I don't think the first-mover or network effects are particularly strong in the case of Uber. I have a hard time believing that the overwhelming majority wouldn't jump ship immediately if a competitor arrived on the scene who could offer better fares for customers and/or better rates for drivers. By comparison, an upstart Facebook competitor wouldn't be able to compete even if they could "outprice" Facebook (I guess "outprice" would be "better data privacy" in this example) because Facebook's product is the network. Of course, being able to compete with Uber (i.e. offering better rates/fares) is still prohibitively hard for most upstarts, but that's different than first-mover or network effects.