I don't think that is what these protests are about at all. For instance, in France, the protest leaders have called on instituting required time-delays for all Uber pickups(15 minutes). They've also called for a nationalized taxi hailing application that would exclude Uber, and have called for Uber's app to be disallowed from showing driver locations.

Similarly, Britain's protesters have demanded Uber to do away with fare estimates.

Notice how these complaints aren't in the form of: Let us do what Uber is doing. Rather, they take the form: Stop letting Uber do what it's doing. The Taxi owners want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to continue to protect their business models by placing artificial limits on competition, and they seek to disallow novel technology that would make their fare structure less opaque.