There are laws that protect people from physical harm such as licensing for doctors or to keep people in certain fields from working too many hours (e.g. airline pilots and Emergency Room Doctors).
There are laws that protect patents, copyrights, and other forms of IP so that inventors, writers can get some returns on their work.
Then there are laws put in place by special interest groups to benefit themselves economically creating a market inefficiency (e.g. "rent-seeking") at a cost to others. In NYC, before Uber/Lyft came on the market the was a political restriction ("rent seeking") of 13,000 hailable cabs throughout a city of population exceeding 8 million creating a politically-induced scarcity. At times it was hard to get cabs, the value of a Taxi medallion was $1.2 million.
Then Uber/Lyft/Gett/Via came along and hailable taxis are more readily available at lower costs but the value of the Taxi medallion is now less than $750,000. Naturally the medallion owners fought politically to protect their politically induced scarcity that harmed consumers in both availability and pricing.
Many of the laws that Uber is countering is in the form of "rent-seeking" laws that create a market inefficiency benefiting special interests and that harms consumers in terms of availability and price.
It is wrong that taxpayer money go into enforcing these laws that benefit special interests over consumers. Tax money on law enforcement should be spent fighting violent crime and activities that lead to violence crime, insider trading and other forms of white collar crime, etc.
You call it "rent seeking" but that's just not the case. Almost every law is founded in some sort of public interest. In 1937, NYC passed the Haas Act to clean up the taxi industry which had become so competitive that taxi drivers were not able to make ends meet (sound familiar?) and were turning to less than legal means to supplement their income.
While that law is 80 years old, its original principle was to provide a safer more reliable experience for the average person. And it worked. Should it be re-examined, yes absolutely. But to disregard it as "rent-seeking" and suggest that uber/lyft other tech startups shouldn't be subject to the same rules as everyone else is grossly negligent and demonstrates a true lack of understanding of the problem at hand.
Not to mention, this is entirely off topic from the Greyball tool.
This is a common and bad form of argument: "there is at least one conceivable justification for this law, so it is not rent-seeking".
But no one ever makes their primary public justification "we'd like to screw over the public and make more money". There is always something about some harm that the law will prevent. The question is whether the law is well targeted and proportionate. The restrictions on supply for taxi medallions fail that criterion by a long shot.
Just because the law is problematic (and let's be clear, it's problematic, but 1000 times less so than drug laws, for instance) doesn't give Uber a blanket right to keep cops from hailing their vehicles, unless you really think that there's no scenario where Uber or its drivers could be legitimate targets of investigation.
Then there are laws put in place by special interest groups to benefit themselves economically creating a market inefficiency (e.g. "rent-seeking") at a cost to others. In NYC, before Uber/Lyft came on the market the was a political restriction ("rent seeking") of 13,000 hailable cabs throughout a city of population exceeding 8 million creating a politically-induced scarcity. At times it was hard to get cabs, the value of a Taxi medallion was $1.2 million.
Then Uber/Lyft/Gett/Via came along and hailable taxis are more readily available at lower costs but the value of the Taxi medallion is now less than $750,000. Naturally the medallion owners fought politically to protect their politically induced scarcity that harmed consumers in both availability and pricing.
Many of the laws that Uber is countering is in the form of "rent-seeking" laws that create a market inefficiency benefiting special interests and that harms consumers in terms of availability and price.
It is wrong that taxpayer money go into enforcing these laws that benefit special interests over consumers. Tax money on law enforcement should be spent fighting violent crime and activities that lead to violence crime, insider trading and other forms of white collar crime, etc.