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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.
It's a taxi company
I can order a taxi online already. Why would a particular implementation of ordering transport online suddenly make it something completely different?
If you take away the cars, Uber no longer has anything to sell. If you take away the online app, they could switch to some other channel and continue.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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 They had to tell her that due to his use of outdated techniques, all of which were "safe" by the standards of the licensing committee, the best they could offer her would be to moderately repair the damage he did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."
Who runs the meter and collects the money?
If Uber doesn't want to be a Taxi company, then they should really stop focusing so much on carrying people around in cars.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
What a bullshit. They should instead adapting the law to the changing times. This is like deciding whether a computer is an abacus or a typewriter.
This is a false analogy for two reasons:
First, in the candlemakers' appeal, the requst is to kill the competition. In the Uber case, the question is which body of law to apply. These are not parallel questions.
Second, Bastiat's appeal is fictional and based on satire and oversimplification to make a point; the Spanish judge's request is based in actual events and law, which are much more complicated.
Surely it should be possible that a company arranges for people to get rides from private persons. Any other ruling from the Court would be dreadful.
Nobody says a company cannot arrange for people to get rides from private persons. For example, that has been done for more than 20 years in Germany. If you want to travel from Bremen to Munich, you find a Mitfahrzentrale which will find a person who wants to drive that way anyway and takes you with them.
Uber however arranges from people to get rides from legally professional drivers, who drive their car specifically from the place where you want to leave to the place where you want to go, for hard cash.
What can you do with UBER, as a user? You may request a cab and pay for the ride. What about a driver? You get ride requests, payments for the rides and incentives to buy your own car. The final service: take passenger from point A to point B.
As a user, you can't request a taxi; taxi's are run, at least in France, by a monopoly; you can request a driver with a car, and pay for the ride.
As a DRIVER, you can request a car and pay for a ride as well.
Isn't this exactly what the "cab unions" have been doing for decades with voucher systems and a telephone central?
No. Uber also adds "actually showing up" because of their ratings system, and "not obstructing traffic every time the Uber contractors decide to get pissy about something". Both of these are substantial benefits that taxis don't have.
First they'd need to become a ride-sharing service. Currently they are rather far from that, right in the "taxi company" territory.
Spain has a history of doing stupid things involving the Internet.
Their "unintended consequence" to forcing search services to not list headlines from news services unless payment for the content happened, was that they got delisted from news.google.com and other Google search results.
"We wanted you to pay us, not delist us!" was a stupid response to the delisting.
The unintended consequence in this case, should the court agree to hear it, is that there will be a single law on the books regulating taxi companies in all EU countries as a result.
This "cure" will likely be worse than the "disease", in terms of overall fallout.
Uber could not be a pimp, they just facilitate the matching up of hookers and johns, process the payments and take a cut.
Uber could not be a slave trader, they just facilitate the matching up of slaves and slave owners, process the payments and take a cut.
Uber could not be a murder for hire company, they just facilitate the matching up of assassins and people who need someone dead...
Don't worry, it's just digital services, nothing illegal going on at all!
1) I have yet to meet an unsafe driver. These people driving for both services care about what they're doing unlike Taxi drivers. I've been nearly killed more times than I care to count by Taxi drivers who are working a long shift or who got their licenses in cracker jack boxes.
2) If there's a problem, it gets resolved quickly with Uber or Lyft. With a Taxi company I have to deal with a local government bureaucracy who rarely follow up or actually deal with the complaint. I'm talking about you DC Taxi Commission.
3) I travel frequently on business, I get one set of bills and it's concise not scribbled out and also not billed to some third party company you've never heard of.
4) The pricing is consistent and easy to understand, not some byzantine billing scheme where just getting in the cab can cost you an arm and a leg. I also don't get taken for a ride so to speak, you know when the driver pads the meter.
5) Obtaining a ride and tracking it is easy.
Uber and Lyft can be put out of business very quickly if the protected monopoly of Taxi companies and various commissions just started offering a more competitive environment; that's the big threat here. You have a service that comes in and undercuts a cash cow for governments and for license holders. They don't like it because it threatens their bottom line and that's a valid argument but instead of being more competitive, they protest and burn things (like in France recently)
I also agree that whoever is driving me should be screened, a safe driver and the vehicle I'm in should be safe and reliable but I'd argue that a lot of Taxis at least in the US don't meet that criteria regardless of the litany of bureaucratic organizations that are supposed to make sure that it is. I also want these services not to use me as a mined resource for further profit. If I can get all of that from a Taxi cab, I'll use them more.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That depends on the extent to which cities and road systems (something created and designed by people, except in the case of Boston which was designed by cows) serve a social function as an indispensable part of that society.
If democratic society functions completely the same no matter what transportation does, then sure. Transportation can do what it likes as it doesn't matter.
If systems like cities absolutely require a transportation infrastructure, then society itself has a vested interest in dictating how that can go. It doesn't mean you have to have a state transportation system (though that does work). You can privatize it. Like taxi companies! Amazing how those can act with their own interests (even to the point of angering slashdotters) while also serving the needs and requirements of the larger society. You could nationalize it: you could nationalize Uber! But we typically don't, and so they function as independent entities but serve the requirements of the larger system, which must have some form of transportation to exist.
There's no special reason why 'a company arranging for rides between private persons' gets to step outside that overall context. If they are benefiting the overall society, we adapt to include them. If they can be recognized as a thing like a pyramid scheme, where it appears desirable but carries inevitable bad consequences that come out of what the system itself means, then we as a society get to say 'never mind the bait, this is forbidden because we don't like the bad consequences'.
Heck, net neutrality is an instance of society saying 'yes, fully enabling the freemarket will give companies more ability to drive profit, but we don't like the inefficiency of maximizing for THAT result and we don't like the bad consequences'.
Uber greases the wheels for certain high-quality easy transactions in transportation-heavy areas serving rich people wanting convenience and servitude, while turning over service of undesirable areas and situations to raw freemarket mathematics. Society is allowed to decide there are situations not subject to 'what the market will bear', and taxi companies are held to that on pain of losing permission to exist.
Uber wants to operate purely on freemarket principles and allow the individual drivers to fail this test with the buck stopping there. No larger global consequences, they just keep the profit and socialize the risk. Part of the system is churning through drivers aggressively with new ones entering the system, so by definition it requires subjecting riders to failing drivers at no penalty to Uber: it becomes the rider's problem to soak up the damage of the failed transaction and 'rate' the driver to get them fired (which I don't think is a guarantee? Depends on how many more drivers want to apply, surely). The rider takes on the burden of becoming the city's transportation police and justice system, actively criticizing the Uber driver and issuing rulings like a judge on which hapless schlub with a cellphone lives or dies in the Uber system. The rider gets a new job, which they must take seriously or the system breaks down and bad drivers continue to operate.
They're not paid for this service. The rider PAYS to perform this service. They are inspecting the meat by eating it, they are issuing licenses for surgery AFTER the operation takes place. (certainly loss of limb or death can be a consequence either from surgery or vehicle travel, licensed or unlicensed)
That's why 'a company arranging for rides' exists in a context. It's possible for a company to arrange for mob hits between private individuals, and that would still be illegal because the range of underlying behavior being 'arranged' contains societally undesirable things. Same with Uber.
Indeed. I think a fair number of people making the argument,
"This should be operated with minimal rules so the market can decide how best to handle things! Bad solutions will fail and the best solution will prevail!"
are shall we say innocent of history. Typically a system like the NYC medallion system exists because at some previous time, the looser 'freer' system was in place, and it persistently led to catastrophic results. The 30,000 cabs on the street fighting for fares was not an accident, it was the natural consequence of New York City being New York City. The more repressive and thoroughly unfree system that arose, evolved out of the peculiar challenges of New York City. One of them is extreme wealth, which drives the unaffordable cost of the medallions.
That very thing illustrates the problem: the market of NYC tries to put so many cabs on the road that the roads cease to work for anybody, including emergency vehicles, garbage collection and so on. It's a bit like a good citybuilder game: you can get situations where things go out of balance and snowballing consequences produce a massive die-off and the destruction of your city.
NYC is allowed to not choose that.
Pretty much. If I go to the websites for Pizza Hut, or Dominos, or Papa Johns and order a pizza, I'm buying the end-product of a pizza. Honestly I do not care how the company internally handles my order, their service and product is in the food production and distribution market.
The only companies that are actual tech companies sell technology products or possibly technology consulting services to others. It doesn't matter if that technology company internally moves product or materials around on trucks or on ships or in planes to get physical stuff from one plant to another, or even to get products to their customers, they're not first and foremost a shipping company in those circumstances.
It's all about what the company provides to the customer. All of the rest is merely internal organizational structure and usually isn't any of the customer's concern so long as what the customer is paying for is provided.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.