Flywheel Taxi, a San Francisco cab company, is suing ride-hailing company Uber for predatory pricing practices, claiming that Uber uses its billions of dollars of venture capital to undercut rivals on rides “in an effort to force all competitors from the market and establish a complete monopoly.”

The San Francisco taxi industry has lost 65 percent of its riders and 30 percent of its drivers since mid-2012, when Uber began its low-cost UberX service, the suit said.

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Law professor Mark Lemley, director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, said Flywheel will have an uphill battle making its case.

Courts, including the Supreme Court, “have deliberately made it extremely hard to prove predatory pricing,” he said. “The complaint that a competitor charges too little money is usually not evidence of a secret conspiracy to drive everyone out of the market and then raise prices; it’s usually (made by) someone who is failing to compete in the market and is upset about it.”

Another impediment to the case is that there’s plenty of competition for rides, he said.

“The theory that if Uber just drives (taxis) out of business it will suddenly triple prices and everyone will be stuck with them ignores the existence of Lyft and other competitors,” Lemley said. “It also ignores that if Uber did that, people would just shift to another source of rides.”