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Europe's Top Court To Decide If Uber Is Tech Firm Or Taxi Company
An anonymous reader writes: A Spanish judge has requested that the European Court of Justice determine whether or not Uber is a generic "digital service," as it claims, or a "mere transport activity." If the court rules that Uber is a transportation firm the company may have to follow the same licensing and safety rules as taxis and other hired vehicles. "Today's news means that the European Court of Justice will now determine if the national rules currently being applied to digital services like Uber are legal and appropriate under European law," said Mark MacGann, Uber's Head of Public Policy for EMEA, on a conference call with journalists.
I have a relative who dealt with a surgeon who was the only game in town in his specialty. Turned out that the man hadn't bothered to do much to update his knowledge of his specialty in about 15-20 years. Several surgeries later, the relative ended up going to a major regional university's affiliated hospital. They had to tell her that due to his use of outdated techniques, all of which were "safe" by the standards of the licensing committee, the best they could offer her would be to moderately repair the damage he did and there was simply no way she'd ever be right again. They said that had she gone to them or someone else in the same field who bothered to keep up, she'd have probably recovered just fine or at least would have had the majority of her pain and functional issues gone.
People in favor of licensing professionals would say "imagine how much worse it could have been." We say "imagine how much harder he'd have worked if he had more competition." If licensing and regulation doesn't keep professionals like doctors and lawyers in line, I see absolutely no benefit to putting up barriers to entry in jobs like taxi driving. Toughen up the liability laws and make it easier to win on "failure to do (what is reasonably known by practitioners) right."
This is one of few instances when courts would be wise to do nothing and refuse to rule on the question.
The question is meaningless the same way it is meaningless for the court to rule whether the boiled egg needs to be cracked at the sharp end or the rounder end.
I would also like to remind the famous French Candle makers' petition asking the lawmakers to intervene:
"We (French candle-makers) are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun.
We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/20...
I can order a taxi online already. Why would a particular implementation of ordering transport online suddenly make it something completely different?
Because it's not a Taxi, and that makes it different. A taxi is a generic hire car which is not also a personal vehicle. These are personal vehicles which are also available for hire. It's directly analogous to a torrent site, except Uber gets a cut. Torrent sites don't try to monetize because that is clearly illegal. It is not clearly illegal to hook riders up with drivers, so there's no reason not to profit.
If you take away the cars, Uber no longer has anything to sell.
The cars don't belong to Uber, so you can't take them away from Uber. This is you insisting that people don't have a right to use their vehicles as they see fit; in a world in which it is illegal to be poor, you would stand in the way of people engaging in economic activity.
I hear a lot of shit about how the roads belong to all of us, but when you want to actually use them, you find out that's not true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sounds like it is not a taxi company if you can take away their taxis (cars) away and they can do something else.
How it that different from any other taxi company?
Uber doesn't own the cars, and the taxi company owns the cars. Since, you know, they could dispatch people with mules instead of people with cars; are they now a drayage company, as well?
Many taxi companies do not own the cars, they are owned by the taxi driver/license owner. Exactly like Uber. And many taxi companies have app solutions for booking taxi. Exactly like Uber. Don't get me wrong, I like and use Uber myself, but the competition playing field should be equal. Where I live Uber Black use licensed, trained and insured limo drivers, so legal and fine.