[1] Especially the ones with a civil law system which is all of them except the UK.
I am a British citizen living in Europe, and I'm for one pretty happy that Uber is trying to drag the taxi industry into the 21st century. Lots of my friends like and use Uber (though I don't use them myself as for some reason the app cannot verify me), I've yet to hear a single complaint about their service.
The Spanish decision doesn't have anything directly to do with protecting people. It was triggered by complaints by the competition, it states that Uber is illegal because it's not authorised not because of some specifically bad thing they're doing .... if this is defending the consumer, why doesn't it look or feel like it?
Frankly, the chance of an Uber-like company getting started in Europe feels close to zero. If it were up to us here to shake up the taxi business and apply basic mobile technology to it, I'm not sure it'd ever happen at all. America is hardly a perfect country and its people are not a perfect people, but you must admire their drive to get things done.
The Spanish laws in play are absolutely not defending the consumer, they're defending the worker. That's the entire point: in the US, consumer rights often trump worker rights, but that's not the case everywhere.
Europeans in general seem to also have a different conception of what the word socialist means, compared to Americans.
That already has a name: mixed economy.
"Socialist" in the American vernacular is too coarse grained when talking about politics beyond its own borders, since the connotation seems to always just be "left of American politics"... :)
The UK doesn't have the same problems as the US has, we don't have a shortage of private hires or cabs caused by a limited supply of medallions and we don't have sprawling suburbs with poor public transport.
While corporatism in the EU is often veiled in pro-consumer language, this is nothing but a thin smoke screen. The roots of corruption go extremely deep. I'd even go as far as to say that most EU countries are ultimately governed by special interests and captive bureaucrats with only minimal input by elected officials.
One recent, relevant, and particularly egregious example: GMOs are widely banned under the guise of protecting consumers (from what, they don't say of course), while the agricultural lobby is in charge of agricultural policy: they steal ~55 billion euros per year just in direct subsidies!
This is somewhat incongruous with the Spanish court talking about "unfair competition"; and with "the move follows a complaint by the Madrid Taxi Association."
To help with the discussion, I dont think "politics love people more than in US". Just that people's "lobbies" have more "media power" than in the USA. And its a really bad timing for uber to come to our countries: anything that can sound like more unemployment its going to be rejected by government, even if it's false. Its a false dilemma, but taxi drivers are saying that government is destroying 5K jobs just in Madrid and giving them to the yankees.
Not at all. There's regulations that you need to follow to transport people for money. Skipping these regulations to offer a cheaper fare constitutes unfair competition. Your competitors have the right to complain.
Those regulations can protect consumers - if that's the case is a different issue. (I can think of quite a couple of ineffective consumer protection laws that were passed with honest intentions but failed horribly.)
You've presented a plausible argument why unfair competition is bad for consumers. But if consumer protection is the real focus, it seems likely that the court would instead have spoken about how Uber is violating such-and-such regulation which is in place to protect customers.
(And to be fair, maybe the court did explicitly talk about that as well, and the BBC didn't quote that part. I'm not drawing any firm conclusions here.)
When the court is talking about the effects on other companies, and when the court is only involved because of the actions of - krammer says it's not a company, but it certainly doesn't sound like a group of taxi customers - that's the kind of thing the court does when it's protecting companies, not when it's protecting customers. It's not damning, but it's suggestive.
> "Drivers who transport people for payment without a licence are breaking the law," said the decision from the Hague-based Trade and Industry Appeals Tribunal.
This sounds like asking for a heap of trouble though:
> In a statement on Monday, Uber said it would continue to offer UberPop, despite the threat of a fine of up to €100,00 for itself, and one of up to €40,000 for drivers.
Regulator-politicians aren't looking to "protect citizens/consumers" they are looking after their asses, because if they were they would get rid off the current taxi system and start from scratch, or at least take an Irish-like approach.
UPDATE: This is the main reason why Uber has been banned http://ep01.epimg.net/ccaa/imagenes/2014/12/05/madrid/141779...
But like the top comment said, maybe it's a cultural thing.
Sounds like a joke.
I live in France, and there's a lot of lobbying here. But again, we're the country of mass strikes, so...