"We REALLY do not need to worry about laws and regulations"
Laws and regulations shape the marketplace, and determine which vendors you can vote with your dollars. In the absences of a free-market, there is no option to vote with your dollars. It's like voting in an election where the potential candidates have been preselected by an oversight board (see Hong Kong)
This is untrue. Leverage shapes market and it is being proven that laws and regulations are malleable. Unfortunately, this cascades down from regulation, to law, to rights.
While Taxis and regulatory controllers found it difficult to challenge Uber on the ground after it had occupied every state and municipality, for better or for worse only enforceable laws provide leverage to exert behavior or the perception of such an enforcement.
Taxis and regulatory controllers found it difficult to challenge Uber because they didn't operate a taxi service - they were operating an entirely new market which hadn't been envisioned and had little to no regulation around.
I guarantee you Uber / Lyft would have been shut down hard if they had tried to take street hailing - for 50+ years law/regulations controlled who you could hail a taxi from, and so little to no competition on quality/service took place in that marketplace.
BTW, I'm not saying this is completely and absolutely true for all markets (though, ironically, you chose one where it is pretty much an absolute) - but the more and more regulation you see around a market, the less and less flexibility new competitors have to come in and disrupt.
Zenefits is an interesting case that straddles this though - in Utah, there was some regulation that made life difficult for them, and with effective lobbying by A16Z, the regulation was changed to allow Zenefits to compete there. And, of course, we've seen ares where they've discovered they really do need to comply with the law - though in most of those scenarios the requirements were so minimal (and probably reasonable) that they weren't much of a barrier to competition - just a minimal level of qualification (like having a drivers license, background check, and insurance for Uber)
Laws and regulations shape the marketplace, and determine which vendors you can vote with your dollars. In the absences of a free-market, there is no option to vote with your dollars. It's like voting in an election where the potential candidates have been preselected by an oversight board (see Hong Kong)