That doesn't really feel like the same thing to me.

With Uber you had a company that wanted to enter an existing market but couldn't due to legally-granted monopolies on taxi service. And given that existing market, you can be sure that the incumbents would lobby to keep Uber locked out.

With Waymo you have a new technology that has a computer driving the car autonomously. There isn't really any directly-incumbent party with a vested (conflict of) interest to argue against it. Waymo is a kind of taxi, though, so presumably existing taxi operators -- and the likes of Uber and Lyft -- could argue against it in order to protect their advantages. But ironically Uber and Lyft "softened" those regulatory bars already, so it might not have been worth it to try.

At any rate, the regulatory and safety concerns are also very different between the two.

I think I am also just a little more sympathetic to early Uber, given how terrible and cartel-like taxi service was in the past. But I would not at all be sympathetic toward Waymo putting driverless cars on the streets without regulatory approval and oversight, especially if people got injured or killed.

My understanding is that regulations for Waymo were much more strict because they billed themselves from the beginning as fully self-driving and wanted to operate on public streets.

My assumption is that they could have found ways to work around that by technically having someone in the drivers west, for example, but maybe I'm wrong there!