As a working cabbie I can confirm the game is pretty much dead as we know it. It just needs someone to do the decent thing and cut down the body.
The taxi industry is 20th century analogue. Uber is 21st century digital. Simple as that. Yet it beggars belief that they never saw it coming. Where's old Reggie and Nifty when you want them? Uber would never have got off the plane!
Once their influence and political clout went we were sitting ducks for the first disruptive challenger. So the industry remains in denial, unable to match Uber's low cost business model or price structure. And our app now halted by the ACCC may be the last straw.
Regulation of Uber is just a matter of time in my view. Now the ACT has bent over for Uber other States will quickly follow with noises about reviews and the shared economy and level playing fields, blah, blah.
The elephant in the room, of course, being their feckless enabling of a non-tax paying start-up to smash a legitimate tax paying industry. Dopes. Absolute dopes. Straight from the Joan Kirner school of economics.
Doesn't matter. The next (non)future is already upon us with reports one can now catch a driverless cab in LA. Just glad I'm an investor in other disruptive tech stocks because I won't be retiring in 6 yrs time driving cabs.