I don't see that happening. There's no natural monopoly here and almost no barriers to entry. The moment Uber tries to leverage being the only one left, someone new will undercut them.

This is basically like saying "I don't see why someone couldn't just build a Youtube alternative. There's no barrier to entry, basically. You can just buy as many hard drives as you need if Youtube acts up!"

Except the twenty gazillion dollars you need to get started anyway, and the fifty ga-jillion dollar incumbent you're stacked against who already, again, has leveraged their death grip on the market -- which is presumably why you were becoming a competitor at all, right? To fight that?

Why would you need twenty gazillion dollars? It's a business you can enter with a cell phone, a car, and a license. If you really want a smartphone app, you're looking at maybe six figures to build it and some pennies per active user per month to keep it running.

The comparison with YouTube doesn't work, because videos are not fungible. If there's a video you want to see, and that video is on YouTube, your choice is to use YouTube or not see it. If there's a place you want to go, you can use any transportation service that covers the area.

I'm having trouble thinking of a good comparison, because there aren't many markets that are this easy to enter. Maybe house cleaning would fit. If Homejoy had taken off, would there be any fear of it abusing a monopoly position, when anyone can trivially enter the market and compete on their level?

There will be a natural monopoly (or rather, a natural oligopoly) once the car makers all have their own autonomous carsharing fleets and sell cars only with an EULA that forbids ridesharing. The entry barrier for car manufacturing is way higher.

>sell cars only with an EULA that forbids ridesharing.

It'd probably be leases, rather than sales - selling property gives the buyer more rights, which would make that sort of EULA problematic. Might be able to side-step it by a combination of forbidding commercial ride-sharing in order to keep the self-driving system up to date along with requiring up-to-date self-driving software to be road-legal.

Ok, but a lot of companies are working on self driving cars.

If one company refuses to sell self driving cars to consumers/upstart ride sharing companies, then that means that ANOTHER self driving car company can makes 10s of billions of dollars by ignoring this rule.

Do you really think that not a single one of the multitude of self driving car companies would break the collusion agreement, if there is 10s of billions of dollars on the line?

i think you are right about the barriers to entry, but uber will have tremendous resources to kill/acquire any upstart. any prospective competitor is going to have to be very well-financed to deal with uber's ability to price them out of the market.