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Court Orders UberPop Use To Be Banned In All of Italy
An anonymous reader writes: A judicial court in Italy has ordered the UberPop app to cease offering its services [original source, in Italian], as it constitutes "unfair competition" again the taxi sector (taxi licenses in Italy are numbered, each can cost more than $100k to obtain). This sentence should be valid at the national level and comes after an injunction from taxi drivers in Milan, where a Universal Exhibition is incidentally bringing in thousands visitors from all over the world on a daily basis. Sources mention a judicial request to "block" the app, though no one is sure how this sentence has to be enforced and what the fines would be in case of violations.
"(taxi licenses in Italy are numbered, each can cost more than $ 100k to obtain)."
There's the problem. Piss off Italy...
As if there's no public interest in limiting the number of taxis on the road. If licenses weren't numbered, the proliferation of taxis would render city streets unnavigable. They are a public resource, and may not be monopolized by ride-for-hire services.
But no, we all must be butthurt about unfair competition, as if the only thing that matters is the unregulated jitney operator.
Hmm, let's do that...
So, we double the 13000-odd taxis to 27000-odd taxis.
And then we compare that to the 30% of New Yorkers who use private autos to commute to work. So, 30% of 17+ million is about 5 million privately owned cars on the road daily.
Now, it seems to me that 13K taxis is about 0.25% of the total autos on the roads, so when we double the number of taxis, we should have about 0.25% MORE vehicles on the road in NYC.
Somehow I don't see one extra car for every 400 currently on the road to be a meaningful issue....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As if there's no public interest in limiting the number of taxis on the road.
No, there is no public interest in inhibiting fair competition. This is about protecting vested private interests, not the public interest.
If licenses weren't numbered, the proliferation of taxis would render city streets unnavigable.
Hogwash. The supply would only be high if the demand was high. If there were too many taxis and not enough passengers, then some drivers would go home and take the day off. Free markets don't solve every problem, but they can solve this one.
If you want to see how extreme unregulated taxi services can get, I suggest visiting Kampala or some other city in a sub-Saharan country sometime - 500 drivers all vying for the same fair, to the extent where fights actually break out and the passenger is physically pulled this way and that, 30 people jammed into an 8 person minibus. Yeah, some regulation is just common sense.
You forgot something. Each taxi is on the road all day, a private auto is not.
No, that is bullshit.
If you want fair competition, you have to do it under the same rules as everyone else.
Not by throwing a tantrum like a spoiled child and deciding the rules don't apply to you.
This has nothing to do with fair competition, or protecting entrenched players. This is about governments having the authority to pass laws, and whiny idiots claiming they don't want laws.
Uber wants to run a illegal cabs, contrary to the law. The problem isn't the existence of the law. it's that Uber are a bunch of whiny self-entitled douchbags whose business model relies on running illegal cabs and playing the victim card.
Your desire to have the mythical unicorn of the free market still doesn't change the reality that those laws exist, they exist for a reason, and it's not up to Uber to decide what the law is.
Uber aren't the champions of truth and justice ... they're a greedy corporation who think they are something special.
But don't let reality stand in the way of your libertarian fantasy world.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I don't know about this case, but on this side of the world, it wasn't that simple.
These Uber and Lyfts didn't go and bully themselves in the taxi industry. They originally operated differently: You never needed a medallion to run a car service. -You needed a medallion to pick up people hailing you in the street.-
That is very different. What these new startups did, was use technology to remove the need to hail a cab. I could always just go and call a non-taxi car service with a phone. No one needed a medallion to pick me up after i called them.
Since hailing a cab is now obsolete, medallions are obsolete.
If your engineer needed to pay 100k to do work that isn't pre-arranged.....blah, the analogy falls apart so hard I can't even fix it.
I think the reality is somewhere between the two. It's nuanced. Few things are black and white.
There is a value to regulated taxis. I support them. But where regulation is not being updated to allow new mobile phone app services which are good for passengers, drivers and even other road users, then clearly there is a legislation problem. And civil disobedience is a legitimate way to highlight bad law.