Automotive. A good friend who has been working in one of the US's
new electric auto companies described how the regulation governing selling cars was being used by NADA (the National Automobile Dealers Association, one of the largest industry and lobby groups in the country) to make the new entrants' lives very difficult. NADA, for instance, recently
sued Tesla for running "company-owned dealerships" in Massachusetts and
also in New York because the law states that it's illegal for a factory to own a dealership. (To give you some sense of how ridiculous this is, the equivalent in the tech world would be Best Buy suing Apple for launching its own retail stores).
...
Netflix. Uber. Airbnb. Tesla. Fisker. Most economies would kill to have a set of innovators such as these. And yet at every turn, these companies are running headlong into regulation (or lack thereof) that seems designed to benefit incumbents like NADA and Comcast — regulation that, for some strange reason, policy makers seem extremely reticent to change if it results in upsetting incumbents. Daniel Sperling, a professor at the University of California Davis, and director of its Institute of Transportation Studies
summed it up when speaking to the New York Times about Uber:
"Transportation has been one of the least innovative sectors in our society. When I look at these new mobility companies coming, where they're using information and communication technology, at a very high level it's long overdue and should be embraced with open arms."
And yet, that's not what's happening at all. If anything, it's the opposite.
Any guesses as to why?
