I am from Brazil, and I am very happy for Uber going the illegal way, because the illegal way, is the actually moral way.
Here in Brazil we have the "Taxi Mafia", to become a licensed Taxi, you need to at least bribe people, if you get too involved in the Taxi system, you will end interacting with a real Mafia, of the sort that assassinate people, steal millions (or billions) of public money, and send people to sleep with fishes.
Uber is our ray of hope against the Mafia, and the Mafia is fighting back hard (physically assaulting Uber drivers and cars, and doing all sorts of manuevering to ban Uber explicitly to allow the police to arrest Uber drivers).
EDIT: Just something concrete.
There are many, many videos of this stuff, but I could not find the most interesting ones, youtube search is not cooperative today (I keep finding stuff related to some videogames instead)
This video is in portuguese, but is basically about the reporters tricking one guy into thinking they are real taxi driver pretenders, and the guy offers (illegally) to give them a legal taxi license for what was then about 50.000 USD.
when UBER was banned in São Paulo, I watched the discussion in the council, one councilwoman showed a video, also made by reporters, where the Mafia was charging 100.000 USD for a license + car + bribes paid
This is another video, unfortunately part of it is seemly missing...
Stuff in this video (2010): Rio de Janeiro city has only 32000 taxi licenses, but has 6 million inhabitants (plus all the people that go there to work, and tourists).
One guy offered in the newspaper classifieds, to sell his taxi for 70.000 USD, his car is worth 15.000 USD, to is quite obvious what the rest of the money is for.
There are competing Taxi mafias, in one part of the video, a group of taxi drivers from one mafia, beat up a driver from another mafia. (ie: the "foreign" driver stopped to deliver a passenger at the airport, and a person that was waiting approached him, triggering the attack, since he was "stealing" passengers from the competing group territory).
Nearer the end of the video, the reporters ask in front of a shopping mall, how to join their group, they state that one of their members want to leave and is selling his place, that the reporter can buy it, the reporter attempt to see if the money will go to the police, and asks if it will pay bribes, they reply that not in that case, that in the shopping mall the money was protection money, that those that are paying are under protection of a certain person, thus noone will mess with the paying people, those that don't pay risk getting their cabs attacked, ranging from their tires being popped to worse stuff.
There is no doubt that Uber is have great effect in some countries. The question become whether it's replacing one evil with another.
Keep in mind that Ubers goal is to not have any drivers at all which is why they are actively investing in the development and research of self-driving cars.
I'm wondering how driverless cars would be "evil".
Uber isn't hiding their own efforts on that front. Maybe they aren't blaring trumpets about it when they pay their human drivers, but we know where things are going.
You would be surprised how few people think about this.
Keep in mind Ubers success is the market it addresses (personal transportation) is huge and do not require any interest in technology to be either using or working for.
The driverless cars aren't evil but the fact that Uber is using some of those money they make on the current drivers to ultimately replace them I would claim is a form of "evil"
Especially given the circumstances they work under.
I am from Brazil, and I am very happy for Uber going the illegal way, because the illegal way, is the actually moral way.
Here in Brazil we have the "Taxi Mafia", to become a licensed Taxi, you need to at least bribe people, if you get too involved in the Taxi system, you will end interacting with a real Mafia, of the sort that assassinate people, steal millions (or billions) of public money, and send people to sleep with fishes.
Uber is our ray of hope against the Mafia, and the Mafia is fighting back hard (physically assaulting Uber drivers and cars, and doing all sorts of manuevering to ban Uber explicitly to allow the police to arrest Uber drivers).
EDIT: Just something concrete.
There are many, many videos of this stuff, but I could not find the most interesting ones, youtube search is not cooperative today (I keep finding stuff related to some videogames instead)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHY_rITP09E
This video is in portuguese, but is basically about the reporters tricking one guy into thinking they are real taxi driver pretenders, and the guy offers (illegally) to give them a legal taxi license for what was then about 50.000 USD.
when UBER was banned in São Paulo, I watched the discussion in the council, one councilwoman showed a video, also made by reporters, where the Mafia was charging 100.000 USD for a license + car + bribes paid
This is another video, unfortunately part of it is seemly missing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcfOMVAoG6Q
Stuff in this video (2010): Rio de Janeiro city has only 32000 taxi licenses, but has 6 million inhabitants (plus all the people that go there to work, and tourists).
One guy offered in the newspaper classifieds, to sell his taxi for 70.000 USD, his car is worth 15.000 USD, to is quite obvious what the rest of the money is for.
There are competing Taxi mafias, in one part of the video, a group of taxi drivers from one mafia, beat up a driver from another mafia. (ie: the "foreign" driver stopped to deliver a passenger at the airport, and a person that was waiting approached him, triggering the attack, since he was "stealing" passengers from the competing group territory).
Nearer the end of the video, the reporters ask in front of a shopping mall, how to join their group, they state that one of their members want to leave and is selling his place, that the reporter can buy it, the reporter attempt to see if the money will go to the police, and asks if it will pay bribes, they reply that not in that case, that in the shopping mall the money was protection money, that those that are paying are under protection of a certain person, thus noone will mess with the paying people, those that don't pay risk getting their cabs attacked, ranging from their tires being popped to worse stuff.