I was horrified this morning to read on TechCrunch that Ubercab has received a cease and desist order.  For those of you who don’t know what it is, the service is simple and elegant.  In major cities, there are tons of private Town Car services that run executives to the airport (mostly) but are used by many for scheduled car service.  Ubercab decided that while these guys are idle, why not let people request their service through an iPhone app and get a ride around town?  Andrea and I have used the service a number of times as it is significantly nicer and more reliable than a taxi, especially on busy nights.  For this convienience, you pay about 20% more than a typical taxi.  As a consumer I now have a choice of a premium service at a premium price or the standard taxi service at standard pricing.  Well… I used to have a choice

As you can see from the article, the taxi folks aren’t too happy about this and have dusted off some anti-competitive legislation to force Ubercab to shut down.  I ranted late last week to a couple of friends (Orn & Bain) on how I don’t blame labor unions for driving companies into the ground - I blame management.  Labor asks for $60/hr to do nothing?  Who’s the blame, the guy requesting it or the idiot who agreed to it?  We see the same thing in sports.  Do you blame the Atlanta Hawks Joe Johnson for asking for $120M or do you blame the inept front office for giving it to him?

This Ubercab development is a perfect example of the other side where organized labor and more specifically, organized corporate lobbying is killing this country.  Here’s how this probably played out… a politician wants to get votes/endorsement so he approaches the taxi drivers.  They tell him/her that if they support legislation that keeps competitors at bay, they will support him.  Damage done.  We would not have accepted AT&T fighting Skype because it was disruptive to their business model.  We don’t legislate against Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft for building email services that have gutted the postal service.  What if record stores organized 15 years ago and and lobbied for laws that made all digital distribution of music illegal as it would threaten their business.  Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy… should we have created a law so that Netflix had to cease and desist?

Sounds like a joke, right?  Its exactly what’s going on here.  Ubercab offers a better service and experience and charges more for it - unfortunately this time the entrenched industry got their laws in place and will now try to lean on them for protection as opposed to innovate.  In this case, we all lose.