This is somewhat incongruous with the Spanish court talking about "unfair competition"; and with "the move follows a complaint by the Madrid Taxi Association."
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.