First Copenhagen kicked out Uber, now it's kicking out all the scooter companies that've been littering the streets with their business model. Bravo 👏. Electric scooters are nice and fun, but the SV Wild West approach to deployment has been a plague. politiken.dk/ibyen/art79558…
I love that a key reasoning is simply aesthetics! It looks like shit when the streets are littered with tipped over scooters, and Copenhagen does not want to be a city that looks like that, so they just ban that type of business model. Bam.
What's equally compelling here is a basic refusal to simply let unicorn-status-chasing companies dictate how the city should look or feel. This is the essence of democratic control. Now we just need Denmark (and Europe!) to do the same in the digital realm too!
What's so refreshing about this example is also just how straight forward the resolution is. This isn't something that's going to be tied up in years worth of court battles. Or contested in bought ballot initiatives. This is elected officials wielding the power vested in them.
Coming from the US, it's so hard to even conceptualize the situation where large, rich companies do not simply get to dictate their way through the lives of ordinary people, as a matter of assumption.
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