https://seattle.eater.com/2024/2/21/24079162/tony-delivers-seattle-delivery-app-fees-downtown
Tony Illes was working as an Uber Eats delivery person when an ordinance passed last year by the Seattle City Council came into effect in mid-January. The new rule required app companies to pay workers like Illes a minimum wage based on the miles they travel and the minutes they spend on the job. The apps say that this amounts to around $26 an hour, and both Uber Eats and DoorDash responded by adding $5 fees to every order (even when the customer is outside Seattle city limits) while calling for the law to be repealed. According to a recent DoorDash blog post, the ordinance has resulted in an “unprecedented drop in order volume,” a drop that Illes felt personally. He told Geekwire that “demand is dead” and told local TV station KIRO 7, “I didn’t get an order for like six hours and I was done.”
So Illes had an idea: Who needs these apps, anyway? He printed up signs with QR codes directing people to a bare-bones website with his phone number, promising that he would deliver food by bike in Uptown, South Lake Union, Belltown, and a chunk of the downtown core for $5 a pop from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily. All you had to do was order the food and send him the screenshot. He called himself “Tony Delivers.”
It's not about the ads, it's about regulations. The free market dies when regulations get introduced. Especially when these regulations were introduced through lobbying by big corpos, who are trying to protect themselves from competition.
The free market also dies when unregulated companies destroy their competition to become monopolies, destroy the environment and enslave people.
You're correct in that when companies essentially own politicians and get regulations passed that help them do the above, like the system we seem to have now, then that's a serious problem.
The answer to that isn't to get rid of regulations, though. An unregulated free market isn't going to stop factories from dumping toxic waste into rivers or spewing it into the air. It's not going to stop companies from paying employees slave wages. And it's definitely not going to stop companies from using dirty tactics to drive out their competition and become monopolies, as you seem to be suggesting.
A well regulated free market can both reward innovators that come up with new products or services that society values while also protecting the environment and the workers from exploitation, and ensuring healthy competition.
That's not the system we have now, for sure, but we're absolutely not going to get there by getting rid of regulations. We need to yank control of the government (and thus the laws) away corporations and the wealthy and give it back to the people.
RCV
This doesn't seem correct. Historically before IP and trademark laws monopolization was done mostly through actual warfare. The idea of free market doesn't allow that.
Free market does even more warfare, just less noticable
If you want free market without regulations - go to south pole
It's about power.
If you get rid of all regulations, then eventually lying better and louder is a winning strategy. If you regulate the market so that it's no longer agile, then you have monopolies fortified by law.
And depending on who has power, it's shifted between these two extremes separately for every distinct thing.
So I wouldn't deal in absolutes.