Same basic family of loopholes as Airbnb and other "sharing economy" services.
Shift legal liability for regulation following to the end provider, ignore the fact that very many of your providers are almost certainly breaking laws and/or contracts (eg. leases) and hope nobody notices until you're big enough to be a difficult target.
Seems to be a pretty effective model here in the US.
In the case of Uber it's not just the regulatory cost that is being pushed onto the drivers but the capital risk of vehicle purchase and maintenance as well.
Personally, this taught me that with time we all forgot what was provided by old platforms. It's a strange feeling. RyanAir for instance, provides 20$ air tickets... but you can't have more than 1 luggage, and you won't get served food, toilets aren't free, etc etc. Makes you realize that older companies prices aren't complete fluff, but we just forget what's included in their service. Until we need them.
Same for new 'disruptive' startups. You don't pay as much as a Taxi, but it's a random guy, may have insurance, may know how to drive safely, etc etc.. Seems like ensuring all this features to be stable is what drove the cost high in the first place.
The interesting thing about this analogy is that for all of Ryanair's policies on baggage and boarding and frills, they're still required to hold insurance and airworthiness certificates.
Similarly with taxis, I don't have a problem if someone wants to offer a taxi dependent on computer routing or have drivers that don't load the passengers' luggage or whatever, but stuff like insurance and safety certificate should be non-negotiable. I mean, I don't even particularly mind if the insurance comes from Uber stating in writing "we're good for it" to all drivers rather than through a traditional insurer, I just don't think depending on one-off company goodwill to cover problems as seen for Uber and Airbnb incidents is particularly good policy.
They say that kind of stuff because there's no such thing as bad press for Ryanair so it ends up as free brand marketing. They also "considered" lay-down or standing-only flights at one point as I remember.
I'd actually pay extra for full-time standing on flights less than 4 hours if there were actually sufficient space for me (at 6'1") to stand.
Of course, the only reason this comes up is because airlines have eliminated way too much legroom that used to exist, and so I'm sure if they implemented this in the real world it would involve me standing hunched over the entire flight, which becomes far less appealing.
Almost certainly it's regulation that's forcing them to have seats.
They keep the toilets free because they are probably smart enough to know that enough of their customers hate them that they'd piss on the aisle and the clean up costs would be too much.
Shift legal liability for regulation following to the end provider, ignore the fact that very many of your providers are almost certainly breaking laws and/or contracts (eg. leases) and hope nobody notices until you're big enough to be a difficult target.
Seems to be a pretty effective model here in the US.