Franchise laws are the product of decades of overlapping private/public enforcement of contractual issues between dealers and manufacturers. It seems clear on the face of it that Tesla should in no way be encumbered by the arrangements made between General Motors and its dealers, because Tesla never had dealers to pull the rug out from under. And this is notwithstanding the fact that encoding and enforcing agreements between dealers and manufacturers should have been the province of contract law, not statutes.

Taxi regulations serve legitimate purposes beyond enforcing agreements. For instance: in many states, it's difficult to get a job driving taxis or even black cars with a suspension on your record, because the licenses are held by parent companies who are liable to lose them if a driver causes an incident.

Loud arguments declaiming the insanity of applying taxi regulations to a service as excellent as Uber also tend not to engage with the real argument, which is, "what do we do when there are 10 Ubers, and drivers can hop between them?"

You can believe that there are valid reasons to regulate cabs and black cars, or you can not believe that. But it's intellectually dishonest to lump that question in with franchise laws and licenses for florists.

My overall point is that vested interests in many industries are using old laws and regulations to litigate against disruptive companies in their respective industries with the intention of stopping the disruptive company, and where those laws aren't sufficient, they are trying to pass new ones. And that despite this effort from vested interests (often times, government included), I believe that the true innovators will persevere.

Is there something about that you disagree with? I'm not sure what the point of your reply is.

Incumbents in the automotive industry are trying to abuse existing laws to harm or extract rents from Tesla, but should and probably will ultimately fail to do that, because the purpose of those laws is orthogonal to what Tesla is doing.

Incumbents in the taxi/livery business are wielding their regulations against Uber. But their claims are not as specious. They are encumbered by legitimate regulation, and Uber is in part profiting from regulatory arbitrage. Even if they didn't want to throw up hurdles to Uber, they more or less have to lobby to have their regs enforced on Uber, or else be structurally disadvantaged.

This is a distinction you failed to draw in your comment, which drew a circle around "florist licenses", Uber, and franchise laws and claimed they were all part of the same phenomenon. No, they aren't.

Those claims aren't yours to make. How legitimate or illegitimate any given law is in a given circumstance is arguable and subjective. Thus the court system, lawyers, and the entire judicial branch.

Eric's point - that these cases are all part of the same phenomenon - makes complete sense. Incumbents trying to leverage power to stifle innovation from a new generation of companies. It's simple enough, I don't even see what there is to argue.

What there is to argue is that there are industries where regulation serves no purpose other than to stifle competition, and there are industries where regulation serves the purpose of actually protecting people.

Taxi licensing is an example of the latter.

And in general, as much as HN loves the narrative of "plucky disruptive hackers vs. evil entrenched interests", it is fundamentally not right for a company to "disrupt" by skirting laws and regulations that competitors are required to obey. It is also unsurprising that competitors raise an unholy stink when that happens, and you would do exactly the same if placed in that situation.

2. I can't argue that I wouldn't complain if I was an entrenched incumbent. Luckily for me I guess that's not the case.

It's just my opinion, but as I see it, it's fair enough to classify all the aforementioned cases as examples of analog regulations in a digital world. New digital players taking advantage of the latest technology, and old players taking advantage of yesterday's laws.

That's a simple application of logic, with no knowledge of the "court system, lawyers, and the entire judicial branch."

I'm not saying that was your point, but in general I'm bewildered by this growing attitude that web-dev "hackers" can solve problems of humanity by just building a bunch of RoR websites. It managed to reach even at least one TED talk. Sounds to me mostly like front-end developers wanting to feel good that they're making difference when building cat-photo-sharing apps. But somehow it ended up as a global perception that "hackers" build websites and problems get solved.