I'm not sure about that. I'm less sure about trucking and airlines, but telecommunications regulations heavily protected the incumbent for a very long time, and my understanding is that AT&T played a big role in writing them.
That was a bit of a special case, though. The phone company was originally a lot more like the US Postal Service. They were given a guaranteed monopoly, in exchange for accepting the requirement to serve all customers no matter how costly or inconvenient. I don't see a lot in common between a taxi or taxi-like transportation service and a natural monopoly on rights-of-way and wires on poles.
If the AT&T monopoly had been preserved to the present day, and/or the Carterfone decision had gone the other way, I think we would be seeing a lot of civil disobedience in the form of people connecting unauthorized devices to the network.
AT&T accepting regulations in exchange for a guaranteed monopoly sounds a lot like taxi companies accepting regulations in exchange for sharply limited access to the market.
I'm sure we'd see civil disobedience of the form you mention if telecoms deregulation hadn't happened. But my point is that it did happen without the need for civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is reasonable and good when you've exhausted all the normal avenues for change and it's not working. But Uber hasn't even tried to get taxi regulations reformed or removed. They've started out by simply ignoring them without ever trying to work within the system.
The key point being, the telco regulation structure was at one time vitally necessary. The taxi regulations were, and are, not. They're just so much nanny-statist nest feathering, local government at its worst. They are a perfect example of something the free market could handle just fine on its own.
Of course we've definitely crossed over into matters of opinion now.
I don't understand how being unnecessary means that it makes sense to skip over trying to change regulations within the system and go straight for civil disobedience.
All I'm saying here is that if there are problematic regulations you should try to actually get them reformed or removed before you take the step of just outright violating them, because it can and does work sometimes to make that attempt. I'm surprised this is such a controversial opinion.
