That seems exceedingly unlikely to occur, regardless of ad spend, in a state as progressive politically as California (similar to AirBnB’s tone deaf failed ad campaign in San Francisco).
This assumes gig companies haven’t exhausted their runway by then. Humorously, Uber and Lyft thought they might extinguish taxis if they waited them out long enough, and then the California government did the same to them.
California voted against gay marriage AND legalization of marijuana. So it's not nearly as progressive as you think. It took a court case to bring gay marriage to California and a second attempt for pot.
California was once the stronghold of conservativism, recall GOP God-head
Reagan had his political epicenter of Orange County. Now, California is majority minority and much more liberal. Could the same happen to Texas, Georgia, Arizona?
You’d be surprised. Californians love their ability to Uber, if this gets rid of that (or severely curtails it), they would have no problem overriding the legislature at the ballot box.
Maybe! In the interim, burn rates of already unprofitable companies are going to increase drastically. Does it matter if you overturn the law if you’ve already ceased operations?
Uber ride share is actually profitable in California (and most of the USA), they are burning lots of cash on UberEats however.
If this law is applied fairly, it affects taxi and limo operators as well, so everyone will be in the same boat at least, fares will surge but they will still be in business.
I'm curious, do you have a source for the claim that uber is profitable in most of the USA? That goes against their disclosed info of huge annual losses.
Where? I don't see any mention of profitability in CA in your link or in their actual report [1]. You might be referring to the "Results by Offering and Segment" where they report growth in the US and $1.8B in revenue, but they go pretty far to hide where their losses are actually coming from in relation to rideshare. It's not at all clear to me that they are profitable in any rideshare market.
Being profoundly unqualified to evaluate legislation, the electorate is highly susceptible to well-crafted advertising on ballot measures and can easily end up voting for something that they don't philosophically agree with.
This is why direct democracy is generally considered a failed concept and why California's state administration is generally considered a failure, propped up only by the nearly incomprehensible amount of wealth generated in the state.
When I lived in San Francisco, there were several ballot propositions roughly along these lines: various corporations or special interests advocating for some measure that was designed to sound reasonable, but whose explicit purpose was to benefit whoever wrote it and was paying to promote it.
At least while I was there, these never passed.
I remember that the San Francisco Bay Guardian (then an alt-weekly newspaper) used to absolutely howl about these propositions. My memory is that the SFBG hated them even more than, say, the anti-gay marriage proposition which passed in 2008. They were quite unequivocal in labeling them as crony capitalism.
Unfortunately, the SFBG has ceased publication; although they still have a website, they appear to basically be dead.
