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Comment by jwatte | Hacker News Reader

If I wanted to build a legitimate middle man platform - solve contractor/customer match up, and intermediate payments, how should that service be built? Under the theory of this lawsuit, can such a service be built at all, or would it automatically look like an employer?

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You might start by following the "Independent contractor vs employee" guidelines. Of, say, California and the IRS.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_independentcontractor.htm

http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...

One possibility is to find a market where the contractor is really a contractor. Nobody forced Uber to enter the cab business. They could match up contractor/customer payments for lawyers, Bobcat drivers, riverboat pilots, etc.

There are truck drivers who are owner-operators. How's that work? Something like that might be a good business to go into?

How do agents work in the music business?

It would look like a lead generation system with a payment module. You would direct interested parties to each other, and process payments as directed. What they actually contracted to do you would not track.

It looks more like EBay and less like Uber. The more you exercise control over prices, quality, and service, the more you offer a service instead of just being a middleman.

I take Uber several times a week. I think of it as the service. E.g. when the driver takes a shitty route, it's never been the driver's fault. They're just blindly follow the company-provided navigation. So I never leave a less than five star review and whenever I file a request for rate adjustment (maybe once a month), I take care to point out I'm blaming the app, not the driver.

Solution for Uber: allow drivers to set prices. I wonder how long that would last.

yes you could just charge a membership fee to utilize the app

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