Entrenched marketplace incumbents can pose an obstacle to...
Entrenched marketplace incumbents can pose an obstacle to innovation, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Monday at Uber’s Washington office. Rubio was at a media event addressing a Florida law affecting Uber’s operations. Some outdated regulations sometimes are “a barrier to…
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entry” for new innovative competitors, despite not causing bigger incumbents any trouble, he said. He posed various scenarios of this sort, such as “if the carriers had prevented WhatsApp from existing,” since the mobile app allowed a form of communications that may have competed with traditional text messaging that carriers facilitated. He marveled at Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp and how many hundreds of millions of dollars per WhatsApp employee the sale amounted to. Rubio also recalled his time in the Florida Legislature and a market dominated by cable franchises: “Your options were one company,” he said. “We had to pass a state bill to open that up.” Now, in a competitive landscape with Dish and DirecTV and AT&T’s U-Verse, “you get to shop for prices and bundling options,” he said. He also pointed to the struggles of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he’s a member, and how those lawmakers are always trying to pass laws applying to industries “moving faster than Congress ever could.”