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Comment by mises | Hacker News Reader

Then this won't cover them as people seem to think it does, because the actual driving is not uber's business. They run a market-place in which others operate; the actual driving is indeed outside of the hiring entity's usual business. Regardless, there seems to be an obvious loop-hole for uber lawyers to chase.

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The obvious loophole for the businesses to use is to start charging drivers for the service, which makes them customers and not employees.

How is that a loophole?

They would need to redesign their entire app and business model to do that.

I guess they just fired 450 people so it'll be hard to find the programmers to implement something that even superficially gives them the argument that it's a two-sided market. e.g. let drivers set their prices (but make it really hard to change their settings) and give passengers "the best deal" (but make it relatively difficult to search for other deals).

> They run a market-place in which others operate;

A marketplace generally allows those who operate in it to set their own pricing. The fact that Uber exclusively determines both cost and pay for the drivers would run counter to your 'marketplace' argument.

If they ran a marketplace they would have competitive bids from drivers, customers could negotiate it choose drivers, etc.

They have literally none of the hallmarks of being a marketplace.

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