This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 5th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Imagine being talked out of starting a promising business with waiting customers, all because of the crushing

costs of regulatory compliance. Now imagine opening that business and

showing state lawmakers that many of those regulations weren't really needed

after all. It's called the regulatory sandbox and it's now

underway in Utah. Connor Boyac of the Libertis Institute explains how it works.

When Uber and Lyft arrived on the scene. They were operating in many cities in flagrant

violation of states, state laws, city ordinances, and that's one way to do things and it developed a

constituency for their services pretty quickly and when DC went to go write the regulations for it, all the people who are writing

the regulations were already customers.

So in Utah has this innovative way of dealing with those kinds of people who arrive on the scene with a

product or a service and allows them the grace to continue without being immediately

having the hammer come down on them.

That's right.

And Uber, they actually had a playbook. I mean that this was part of their

strategy go break the law. They paid and left as well. They would pay in our case in

Salt Lake City there were drivers being ticketed six6,500 just for driving people around until they

had enough of a constituency as you point out where they could then go to the city council

get the law changed.

Uber could do that, Lyftiff could do that. Why?

Because they had money.

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