Recently, Mike Konczal made a splash with a piece in the Nation titled “Socialize Uber.” His argument was simple: most of the capital used by Uber — the cars, the auto insurance — is paid for by the workers. Yet the workers don’t get any of the profits. (Actually, Uber probably doesn’t make any profits yet, but it collects something like $2 billion a year from drivers; it then blows most of that on marketing and lobbying.)

So the obvious answer is right there in the title: socialize Uber. The company should be run as a worker cooperative. But a practical question still remains: how, as Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal asked on Konczal’s Facebook wall, would you go about turning Uber into a collective?

The simplest way, as I pointed out in response to Weisenthal’s query, would be for cities to adopt regulatory codes that only permit ride-sharing by worker-owned firms. Uber would then seamlessly become a software provider.