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but would Airbnb or Uber exist if they tried to get permission first? Netflix streaming was illegal at first. Youtube for sure. Napster. Tesla (no dealerships i

but would Airbnb or Uber exist if they tried to get permission first? Netflix streaming was illegal at first. Youtube for sure. Napster. Tesla (no dealerships it was direct sales to consumers.) Even craigslist or ebay or the very first Ford Model T. They break rules because that's the only way to test the waters and see if the public wants the rule broken?

Symbiote 2y ago
I don't think most of your examples are correct, but in any case, not everything has to be started in the USA. Private companies running a taxi service (arranged by phone) were widespread in the UK long before Uber, and surely also other places. Why couldn't Uber start there, if the USA was too restrictive?
- ajmurmann 2y ago
  One Uber founder is American and the other Canadian and AFAIK both lived in the Bay area, so they probably prefer staying where they were. How much harder would it be to get VC funding for a business in the UK? They already had VC connections in the US from prior ventures. Same issue probably true for engineers they could bring on board. The UK is a much smaller market. Further, I don't think Uber started out breaking regulations. Initially you could only hail black limos and which were licensed. They only started offering rides from unlicensed drivers in response to competition from Lyft. Lyft in turn started as a long-distance ride sharing company which is also legal. So the hurdle for either company to move to the UK was even higher. Moving an established company to a less important market seems far fetched
tripplyons 2y ago
What was illegal about Neflix, YouTube, and Tesla at first?
- chippiewill 2y ago
  Youtube had a lot of illegal content early on and didn't make much effort to respect rightsholders etc. for a while until the service had taken off.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Right, but that was more an unintended consequence of hosting user uploaded material. They still did delete stuff when companies (or their lawyers) wrote in to them requesting a take down. Compare that to Airbnb or Uber whose business model was "Ignore the law" in the very beginning, which is why they got banned in a bunch of places. YouTube's business model was never "Ignore the law" nor was it banned on as a wide scale as Airbnb and Uber.
    - closewith 2y ago
      A growth strategy, not an unintended consequence. Early YouTube without copyright infringement would have died in obscurity.
      - Cheer2171 2y ago
        Were you even on YouTube back then? It went viral for all kinds of viral home videos.
        9rx 2y ago
        YouTube lived in obscurity until it became the top search result for “Lazy Sunday”.
        Cheer2171 2y ago
        And when NBC finally decided to issue a DMCA takedown months later, Youtube immediately complied. Because that is what the US has decided is the law around user-generated content. NBC had it up for free on iTunes and let it stay up on Youtube because it brought attention to SNL, until someone in NBC's legal or C-suite won some internal fight.
- ta1243 2y ago
  Youtube came to fame because of sharing copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holders. Still does. With Tesla, I've no idea if there are laws preventing direct to customer selling, the "land of the free" has a lot of laws preventing freedom.
  - Cheer2171 2y ago
    User-generated content platforms have had a very specific legal obligation around copyright for decades, which is that they must comply with DMCA takedowns.
  - sixothree 2y ago
    Absolutely not. YouTube came to fame 100% because they made it easy for you to embed your own videos inside of a webpage. This was an incredibly difficult fear at the time that required specialized flash players, conversions, and what not. That’s why YouTube came to exist.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    Many states have laws preventing direct to customer selling. Tesla works around this by just not selling in those states. If you live in one of those states and want to buy a Tesla, you pick it up in a neighboring state that does allow direct sales. Or these days they may have a better workaround where the car is officially purchased elsewhere but you don’t have to physically travel there. This is totally above-board since states are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, so state laws against direct sales necessarily can only apply within the state.
    - ta1243 2y ago
      > Many states have laws preventing direct to customer selling Ahh, land of the free
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Youtube got a lot of users by not fighting piracy. And Tesla had that thing where direct sales were illegal in the US. I don't know about Netflix.
  - davidw 2y ago
    Leaving aside Tesla, banning direct sales is a boon to local car dealerships, who often fund some very reactionary local politics.
Lord_Zero 2y ago
There's definitely a balance between innovation and cancer. AirBnB started off great but now it's a cancer. Housing supply is at a massive shortage and Airbnbs eat up what little remains. 2 houses on my tiny street (which are all starter homes are Airbnb). Uber started off great but quickly became incredibly expensive thanks to surge time and increased costs.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Uber started wrong from the beginning. They were dumping their service. And not charging full cost. That is price that goes to driver and the R&D and marketing after say 1 year.
mrs6969 2y ago
Maybe they should not exist at the first place. So I cant use my car to carry out people, without a permission. However, if I do it with uber, I suddenly can! More than this, I wonder if I can create a company to do taxi bussiness. I will buy 5 car, then rent out 5 more, do taxi bussiness… what makes uber so special, I wonder
- golemotron 2y ago
  Uber is not a great case for your argument. They made the world safer and enabled transportation for people who would otherwise not have it. No one, literally no one, who has spent any time in taxis wants to go back to them. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to call several companies to get a taxi to the airport have none arrive. Uber broke the ice and showed what was possible. There was literally no other way to get past the regulatory capture. Yes, they broke the law, but they are net positive by a large margin.
  - Cheer2171 2y ago
    > Yes, they broke the law How about I go into your house and break the laws around theft? I promise to do good things for society with your property. The ends justify the means, according to your argument.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      Some laws are just. Some aren't.
      - Cheer2171 2y ago
        Oh so it seems you are unaware that in modern societies, there is a thing where if laws are unjust, we have a whole system for changing them. It's called government. If your definition of 'unjust' is different than the political system's definition, you have to push for social change to change the political system. You don't get to short-circuit this just because you're an 'innovator'. How do you feel about protesters who carry out acts of civil disobedience, violating laws to draw attention to the issue? Just curious.
wongarsu 2y ago
What rules did Craigslist, eBay or the Ford Model T break? Craigslist seems like a straightforward digital version of what newspapers and community boards were doing for a long time. eBay is just a digital version of an auction house. And the Model T was just a cheaper more widely available car compared to the cars that came before. None of them seem comparable to AirBnB (subverting hotel regulations by pretending to be something else) or Uber (subverting taxi regulations by pretending to be something else)
- serf 2y ago
  craigslist served as a prostitution and drug trafficking forum for most of its' popular existence. ebay used to allow the sale of presription drugs, prescriptions themselves, body parts , animal cadavers , pirated software, and shipping of weapons to restricted global areas. ebay was also an unreported tax-haven-ish thing for a few early years. (ebay was great fun to browse around in the mid 90s.) the production of the model T had some interesting quirks. When production ramped he essentially bought the entire workforce from certain regions and caused all sorts of social issues. He had his employees self-tattle on each other for 'moral standards'. The model-t itself was also produced off a different patent that was held by someone else and ignored; it was fought for later and won by Ford in 1911.
  - cluckindan 2y ago
    Did you ever read the personals section of a broadsheet newspaper? Because it was the same thing.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Don't forget that Uber burned through VC money at a peak rate of something like 500 million$ a month to subsidise their low prices until they drove competitors out of business and/or established themselves as ubiquitous. In the olden days it was called dumping, now it's disruption.
Cheer2171 2y ago
This is revisionist history: Netflix was legal. Craigslist was legal. eBay was legal, Youtube was legal (yes people uploaded copyrighted content, but they complied with DMCA takedowns as required to under the law)
- andrewfromx 2y ago
  putting DVDs in the mail was legal but when Netflix first started streaming they broke some laws. Craigslist and ebay were "unregulated marketplaces". You're absolutely correct that YouTube complied with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by implementing a takedown system for copyrighted content. However, YouTube's early operations still faced significant legal challenges and criticism because its platform enabled widespread copyright infringement on a massive scale. secondary liability. Viacom claimed that YouTube was aware of the widespread infringement and benefited from it, which they argued disqualified YouTube from DMCA safe harbor protections.
layer8 2y ago
The end doesn’t justify the means. And for half of your examples, one could debate the end being a good thing in the first place.

Symbiote 2y ago

I don't think most of your examples are correct, but in any case, not everything has to be started in the USA. Private companies running a taxi service (arranged by phone) were widespread in the UK long before Uber, and surely also other places. Why couldn't Uber start there, if the USA was too restrictive?

ajmurmann 2y ago
One Uber founder is American and the other Canadian and AFAIK both lived in the Bay area, so they probably prefer staying where they were. How much harder would it be to get VC funding for a business in the UK? They already had VC connections in the US from prior ventures. Same issue probably true for engineers they could bring on board. The UK is a much smaller market. Further, I don't think Uber started out breaking regulations. Initially you could only hail black limos and which were licensed. They only started offering rides from unlicensed drivers in response to competition from Lyft. Lyft in turn started as a long-distance ride sharing company which is also legal. So the hurdle for either company to move to the UK was even higher. Moving an established company to a less important market seems far fetched

tripplyons 2y ago

What was illegal about Neflix, YouTube, and Tesla at first?

chippiewill 2y ago
Youtube had a lot of illegal content early on and didn't make much effort to respect rightsholders etc. for a while until the service had taken off.
- diggan 2y ago
  Right, but that was more an unintended consequence of hosting user uploaded material. They still did delete stuff when companies (or their lawyers) wrote in to them requesting a take down. Compare that to Airbnb or Uber whose business model was "Ignore the law" in the very beginning, which is why they got banned in a bunch of places. YouTube's business model was never "Ignore the law" nor was it banned on as a wide scale as Airbnb and Uber.
  - closewith 2y ago
    A growth strategy, not an unintended consequence. Early YouTube without copyright infringement would have died in obscurity.
    - Cheer2171 2y ago
      Were you even on YouTube back then? It went viral for all kinds of viral home videos.
      - 9rx 2y ago
        YouTube lived in obscurity until it became the top search result for “Lazy Sunday”.
        Cheer2171 2y ago
        And when NBC finally decided to issue a DMCA takedown months later, Youtube immediately complied. Because that is what the US has decided is the law around user-generated content. NBC had it up for free on iTunes and let it stay up on Youtube because it brought attention to SNL, until someone in NBC's legal or C-suite won some internal fight.
ta1243 2y ago
Youtube came to fame because of sharing copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holders. Still does. With Tesla, I've no idea if there are laws preventing direct to customer selling, the "land of the free" has a lot of laws preventing freedom.
- Cheer2171 2y ago
  User-generated content platforms have had a very specific legal obligation around copyright for decades, which is that they must comply with DMCA takedowns.
- sixothree 2y ago
  Absolutely not. YouTube came to fame 100% because they made it easy for you to embed your own videos inside of a webpage. This was an incredibly difficult fear at the time that required specialized flash players, conversions, and what not. That’s why YouTube came to exist.
- wat10000 2y ago
  Many states have laws preventing direct to customer selling. Tesla works around this by just not selling in those states. If you live in one of those states and want to buy a Tesla, you pick it up in a neighboring state that does allow direct sales. Or these days they may have a better workaround where the car is officially purchased elsewhere but you don’t have to physically travel there. This is totally above-board since states are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, so state laws against direct sales necessarily can only apply within the state.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    > Many states have laws preventing direct to customer selling Ahh, land of the free
marcosdumay 2y ago
Youtube got a lot of users by not fighting piracy. And Tesla had that thing where direct sales were illegal in the US. I don't know about Netflix.
- davidw 2y ago
  Leaving aside Tesla, banning direct sales is a boon to local car dealerships, who often fund some very reactionary local politics.

Lord_Zero 2y ago

There's definitely a balance between innovation and cancer. AirBnB started off great but now it's a cancer. Housing supply is at a massive shortage and Airbnbs eat up what little remains. 2 houses on my tiny street (which are all starter homes are Airbnb). Uber started off great but quickly became incredibly expensive thanks to surge time and increased costs.

Ekaros 2y ago
Uber started wrong from the beginning. They were dumping their service. And not charging full cost. That is price that goes to driver and the R&D and marketing after say 1 year.

mrs6969 2y ago

Maybe they should not exist at the first place. So I cant use my car to carry out people, without a permission. However, if I do it with uber, I suddenly can! More than this, I wonder if I can create a company to do taxi bussiness. I will buy 5 car, then rent out 5 more, do taxi bussiness… what makes uber so special, I wonder

golemotron 2y ago
Uber is not a great case for your argument. They made the world safer and enabled transportation for people who would otherwise not have it. No one, literally no one, who has spent any time in taxis wants to go back to them. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to call several companies to get a taxi to the airport have none arrive. Uber broke the ice and showed what was possible. There was literally no other way to get past the regulatory capture. Yes, they broke the law, but they are net positive by a large margin.
- Cheer2171 2y ago
  > Yes, they broke the law How about I go into your house and break the laws around theft? I promise to do good things for society with your property. The ends justify the means, according to your argument.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Some laws are just. Some aren't.
    - Cheer2171 2y ago
      Oh so it seems you are unaware that in modern societies, there is a thing where if laws are unjust, we have a whole system for changing them. It's called government. If your definition of 'unjust' is different than the political system's definition, you have to push for social change to change the political system. You don't get to short-circuit this just because you're an 'innovator'. How do you feel about protesters who carry out acts of civil disobedience, violating laws to draw attention to the issue? Just curious.

wongarsu 2y ago

What rules did Craigslist, eBay or the Ford Model T break? Craigslist seems like a straightforward digital version of what newspapers and community boards were doing for a long time. eBay is just a digital version of an auction house. And the Model T was just a cheaper more widely available car compared to the cars that came before. None of them seem comparable to AirBnB (subverting hotel regulations by pretending to be something else) or Uber (subverting taxi regulations by pretending to be something else)

serf 2y ago
craigslist served as a prostitution and drug trafficking forum for most of its' popular existence. ebay used to allow the sale of presription drugs, prescriptions themselves, body parts , animal cadavers , pirated software, and shipping of weapons to restricted global areas. ebay was also an unreported tax-haven-ish thing for a few early years. (ebay was great fun to browse around in the mid 90s.) the production of the model T had some interesting quirks. When production ramped he essentially bought the entire workforce from certain regions and caused all sorts of social issues. He had his employees self-tattle on each other for 'moral standards'. The model-t itself was also produced off a different patent that was held by someone else and ignored; it was fought for later and won by Ford in 1911.
- cluckindan 2y ago
  Did you ever read the personals section of a broadsheet newspaper? Because it was the same thing.
andrepd 2y ago
Don't forget that Uber burned through VC money at a peak rate of something like 500 million$ a month to subsidise their low prices until they drove competitors out of business and/or established themselves as ubiquitous. In the olden days it was called dumping, now it's disruption.

Cheer2171 2y ago

This is revisionist history: Netflix was legal. Craigslist was legal. eBay was legal, Youtube was legal (yes people uploaded copyrighted content, but they complied with DMCA takedowns as required to under the law)

andrewfromx 2y ago
putting DVDs in the mail was legal but when Netflix first started streaming they broke some laws. Craigslist and ebay were "unregulated marketplaces". You're absolutely correct that YouTube complied with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by implementing a takedown system for copyrighted content. However, YouTube's early operations still faced significant legal challenges and criticism because its platform enabled widespread copyright infringement on a massive scale. secondary liability. Viacom claimed that YouTube was aware of the widespread infringement and benefited from it, which they argued disqualified YouTube from DMCA safe harbor protections.

layer8 2y ago

The end doesn’t justify the means. And for half of your examples, one could debate the end being a good thing in the first place.