Two Uber managers detained in France over 'illicit' low-cost service | Hacker News Reader

Two Uber managers detained in France over 'illicit' low-cost service

theguardian.com

64 pointsedward82 comments

Every time this topic comes up, the discussion always revolves around whether or not Uber is properly licensed, or if it's fair for them to operate. What's often overlooked is the very reason so many of these licenses became as valuable as they did in the first place, and like so many economic issues it boils down to one thing: trust.

For example, anyone who's seen more of NYC than just JFK airport and Times Square knows that that city has plenty of unlicensed rides available. This was true long before uber: white cars whose driver will only say "do you need a taxi?", and dollar-vans are everywhere. Yet, even though they offer an identical service to a licensed cab, people value them far less and fares are often 1/4 what's paid for a yellow taxi.

When it's an officially licensed taxi, you trust that their fares are regulated, your driver isn't a violent criminal, and that their vehicle's in safe working order. This is the real value uber brings: geolocation and well-designed apps are nice frills, but ultimately people are deciding more and more that they trust a business with a rating system for drivers + passengers, upfront rates (even if they vary), and GPS so in the unlikely event you are detained, you can be found.

Seriously, unless you're a lawyer, I have no idea why you'd go around debating what's legal or illegal. Instead, as citizens, we should look at the regulations we have and ask if they still serve to protect people as they once did, or if they now exist to protect political and business interests.

When government conspires with business to create a shortage it needs to be shaken up. The cost to entry for taxi services should not be the absurd numbers quoted in many cities, a number which only exists to benefit the existing companies and the politicians they support.

What likely annoys these people the most is that their little game is being called out. Regulation has its place, that is not stifling competition and restricting people from having jobs

The good thing about governments conspiring to create a shortage is that taxi drivers make a reasonable income.

This is an aspect that Silcon-Valley-style technology platforms have no apparent interest in supporting. For example, as time progresses Adsense might sign up more and more publisher capacity, yet that pushes down the income and discourages respectable publishers from using the service.

You go from a fairly well respected public service, to something that's got a nice brand and run by virtual slaves.

A large majority of Uber drivers are former taxi drivers, you don't have to lease a vehicle for 45k per year, choose hours of work, and you have more control over passengers bad behaviour (two way rating system).

That's the way these things work though. Start-up moves in, offers good rates because they have the VC money to burn. The early adopters do well (like drilling for oil), then after several years reality sets in. The legacy employer no longer exists, in fact, there are no competitors except one or two global technology companies. Finally, cars drive themselves.

And what happens when Uber continues to lower the rates Uber drivers earn at? Eventually taxis will look like a better job again.

That's a meaningless hypothetical. Why would Uber do that? They have every incentive to make sure that drivers are getting paid as much as possible and that riders have the cheapest prices possible, they literally have hundreds of people working on finding the equilibrium.

Once you become the de facto platform and you move from a start-up to a multinational public company, there's no longer a need to look after the contractors. There's added pressure to milk those contractors for all they've got. The contractors are easily replaceable and will live under constant threat of upcoming automation.

No. Uber will always have the incentive to keep drivers happy, as they are competing with every other job. If another position values their time more they will move there.

On the topic of self driving cars, full saturation is at least a couple of decades away.

There are good arguments in favour of restricted supply, mainly because the roads themselves are publicly owned, and the public pays the cost of every extra vehicle on them. What's especially problematic about the way regulations are used now, is they're forcing the exact opposite outcome: uber (and others) are much better at efficiently routing cars to passengers. Taxis driving in loops around the city, waiting for someone to hail them, places far more of a strain on traffic than an uber driver.

I'm not sure about the routing efficiency assertion. Sure a few years ago that would have been true but most taxis are/can be hailed by app at this stage.

Isn't this the lesson about the `disruption` trend we've seen in the previous years. Everybody comes with a cheaper idea, that is actually just doing less while we forgot how much was done in what we thought was too high priced. Saying that after reviewing all that major Airplanes (vs RyanAir) gave you in a flight, food, blankets, gifts, music with weirdly shaped earphones, special magazines... of course we don't use it all the time, but the fact that it is ensured is what makes the cost.

It's not as sensitive as riding in a stranger car with no information about him whatsoever. But the basic idea is the same: we have to be honest and take in account the whole system when comparing.

"No information about him whatsoever"

Please use factual information if you're going to converse. You have more information on an Uber driver than a taxi driver. Picture, licence number, accessible GPS location and drivers rating.

I spoke too fast, but this is not field information. How much pressure and constraints does he have to be a Uber driver beside the ratings ? It's not his main job, can't he quit any time he wants? how much hours does he have ? When a company hire someone they're at risk, it's a natural force to ensure both of them are able to service a client.

I'm unsure what point you're trying to make, would you mind expanding?

I distrust the underlying forces structuring light new businesses like Uber. When the entry cost is too low, people have no reason to put real effort. On the other side of the spectrum, Parisian cabs suffer from too high entry cost, AFAIU they have to work "hard" for a long time before they can reimburse the licence. And that contrast is what's causing the violence.

Okay I understand. The rating system does a good job to resolve that issue. Under a 4.7 and you are not allowed to drive on the system (IIRC). Personally I've experienced, and talked to ~50+ people, who have experienced a far superior service using Uber than alternatives.

"Instead, as citizens, we should look at the regulations we have and ask if they still serve to protect people as they once did, or if they now exist to protect political and business interests."

Those are grand words for defending a taxi company that uses an app with driver + passenger ratings as basis for arguing that it is not a taxi company and that it shouldn't need to employ actual drivers.

Are you sure you didn't think about copyright law or investor state settlements laws when you wrote your comment?

My comment was specifically a criticism of people making legal arguments in these forums. I'm not going to go ahead without a law degree, knowledge of Parisian taxi law, and the few snippets of legal arguments I read in articles, and start debating its legal standing and whether or not it's technically a "taxi" company.

"Instead, as citizens, we should look at the regulations we have and ask if they still serve to protect people as they once did, or if they now exist to protect political and business interests"

Answer: No. Not at all.

Now what? Vote everybody out because they didn't let Uber/Lyft into my city? Cool. Then what? Shall every 4 years I vote everyone out of office to solve my one or two top issues? Great. I can now change things I don't like at a rate of less than one thing per year. Maybe a full issue per year if I'm super lucky.

If your only political involvement is to vote, then no I don't think you're going to have much success in influencing policy. There's a whole lot more you can do: attend council meetings, participate in the q&a at debates, work within a party (where applicable) to support candidates and issues you believe in, write well-researched articles intended for an audience that doesn't already agree with you, or even run for a position in government yourself.

And that's exactly why I like Get Taxi and Uber: they are most trustworthy. In a usual system, taxi parks have too little power and influence, each of them individually, to make these guarantees, and government has the power, but doesn't really have an incentive to do a really good job. Uber/Lyft/Gett, on the other hand, are big enough to have the power of control, but at the same time they still have competition which creates a motive to implement these guarantees.

I think that this comment lacked arguments, so I decided to provide an example of my logic.

Let's imagine that there's a bad driver — nothing horrible enough to be newsworthy, but just bad manners, bad routes, stuff like that. Let's imagine that he operated at an individual taxi park. This means that to provide a feedback to authority, the user would have to spend his time to call the company, to "snitch" about the driver. Would someone do it just to say that "the driver wasn't especially bad, but I would prefer better in the future"? Actually, I think yes, they would, but the probability of this is much slower than a user casually clicking 3 stars icon after the ride. And when you have less data points (customer support calls vs star rating actions), your information is worse has more noise in it. So, your decision making about hiring/firing drivers is worse. This is an argument about size.

And the argument about motivation — I think it's more or less obvious. Let's say your taxi driver has a city-issued beautiful plate in his cab. Do you even know who to call after he loads you off at a wrong street? Do you think they will be working at 11pm on Friday? Do you think they will be responsive and appreciative of the situation? Well, I assume that you interacted with bureaucrats at least once in your life, so the questions are really rhetorical.

These are examples about only one component of the trust issue, customer support and detection of bad performers, but mechanisms like this would work in other situations too.

Tips are the standard solution for this. Drivers end up making less when there rude.

PS: My response to rating systems is to generally give everyone 1 or 2 stars. Otherwise you end up with https://xkcd.com/1098/ making the whole thing pointless.

That's a tricky approach for an international organization like uber to rely on, as the cultural attitudes toward tipping vary.

Drivers also rate you as a passenger. If they rated you 1-2 stars, you would never get picked up again. By doing what you're doing, you're making your drivers less likely to keep their jobs, just because they landed on some OCD individual who thinks (s)he's capable of restoring the average rating to 2.5. Uber and Lyft drivers need to keep their ratings in the 4.3-4.7 area in order to keep working, so please stop doing that.

Also: end up, they're, response, rating, thing

The whole reliance on fixed points on a 5-point rating scales either assumes that users share a common culture, or is blind to cultural differences in how ratings are applied which are well-known.

Anyone who does that is doing something so stupid that it should be undermined.

fares are often 1/4 what's paid for a yellow taxi.

Maybe this is the actual market rate for the service being provided, and not that people value it less.

It's definitely become a combination of the two. Originally the licensing did provide value to the consumer, because it meant a trusted authority was regulating things -- something people would value quite a bit, when you have to trust the driver not to deliberately harm or extort you. Depending on your region, it's more and more about artificially restricting the supply, so the market rate's probably much lower. I think dollar vans still charge much less than the market rate for a trustworthy taxi. I'd consider a trustworthy cab and a dollar van to be two separate offerings.

The context is important. France happens to have a very influential taxi monopoly headquartered in Paris. The broad lines have been sketched by a recent Nouvel Obs article [1].

Amongst other things, the former head of the French FBI is now chairman of one of the group's taxi companies, right after he delivered an internal government report skewering taxi competitors (and that was probably just the tip of the iceberg). No new licenses were given in Paris between 1990 and 2002 despite a 49% increase in airport passenger traffic and 17% increase in population.

The system itself is designed to maximise revenue; for example, taxis will not be allocated on the basis of proximity to the customer, but on the basis of which has waited longest, time that (according to the Nouvel Obs anyway - I haven't taken a taxi in Paris in ages) is charged to the customer immediately. Drivers pay a fortune to the company and often work 7-day weeks to make ends meet as a result. This, by the way, is why drivers on call in Paris will often refuse to drive you if your destination is too close.

Uber's strategy was simple, to gain so much popularity as to make it extremely expensive for the lobbying effort to continue. Rule of law? Personally, I do not think that people buying themselves favorable laws should be legal and defendable. For both executives to be on police watch when they are clearly not a flight risk is a sign that the monopoly is well connected and has obtained favour with the government.

[1] edit: link is now offline, Web Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20150317180809/http://tempsreel....

Are there no unions in France? I thought this was a big part of the argument as well.

So as to make things clear, UberPop has been outlawed in France months ago but keeps operating.

The fines are considered "operating costs" by UberPop, who takes care of paying the fines when UberPop drivers are getting caught.

You can remove the quotes at illicit.

There are quotes on "illicit" because it is a quote.

To be accurate, the website and app itself (UberPop) aren't outlawed YET.

BUT it is illegal for UberPop drivers to continue taking clients and driving for UBER.

So technically UberPop isn't illegal, UberPop drivers ARE on the other hand performing an illegal activity.

HOWEVER in France, it is illegal to promote an illegal activity. Yesterday I heard an ad on GenerationFM promoting Uber and recruiting drivers.

So on this ground, managers at Uber France can be sued.

I think it's foolish to work for Uber France. Uber might pay you a lawyer or any fines if you get sued, but If you're sentenced and sent to prison? is it worth it to go to prison for Uber? or to have a record? because you're career will basically be over. And good luck moving to US with a record even if it is what Uber promised you if it would happen.

I am astounded that the French government is doing exactly what the violent Taxi protesters (rioters?) wanted. This sends a clear message to any other groups: burn enough cars and blockade an airport and you will get what you want.

I thought the Taxi drivers would be condemned by politicians and the French public.

They're rewarding violence, destruction and kid napping. Terrible.

I'm French and astounded too. You are exactly right.

Petitions in support of Uber are being run very successfully at the moment, and most people around me (working in tech) have vowed to never ever take a taxi again after what happened, but I'm not sure the general public cares that much :(

Taxi drivers ae a large, compact and numerous community.

Politicians will be queueing to show their support, hopefully to be remembered come election time.

> burn enough cars and blockade an airport and you will get what you want

I was under impression that that's how French government, as a lot of other European governments work anyway.

Maybe Uber staged those protests, so that nobody would think about stepping in against them. ;-)

Generally speaking: how many violent protests do you need before you consider changing the law?

Nasty as that may seem, but without violent protests, France would possibly still be a kingdom (and the US a colony).

Well that's how you get stuffs in France, taxis, farmers, truckers, nurses,alike... If you want something from the government in France you've got to set on fire, or destroy something in Paris or you won't be heard.

No surprise here.

It has always been that way. Elections are meaningless in this country, chaos in the streets of Paris has always been more effective than a vote to bend a government that knows nothing but reaction, that never acts nor has a long term political vision for this country.

Everything makes perfect sense. The french government is always in that defensive position. That's an unfortunate but direct consequence of the structure of the 5th republic.

Just to be clear, because it is not mentioned in the article, this is about UberPop. Uber is legal with some caveats.

I like Uber's service, but it's obvious that they are a taxi. A better taxi company, but a taxi; and they should get their licenses in order.

The licenses are what made the taxi system so inefficient.

you are correct, but blatantly ignoring the law is usually not the best way to fix that

What would be a superior method?

I'm not a public policy expert by any means, nor do i claim to be one, however there's a pretty charted history of how laws can be changed. Examples include protests, lobbying, and ballot measures just to name a few. Don't fool yourself into thinking that Uber is on the moral high ground like some civil rights movement. The are a taxi company that is not following well-established procedure. If they want to continue to operate they should either adapt, or lobby for changing that procedure.

It is, as paying fines is cheaper than paying for a license.

When you get to that point, it's obvious that the regulation is backwards, and it's nobody but taxi drivers that made it this way: they got licenses for free, then fought for their right to transfer them for money, then they fought to limit new licensing. Basically they lobbied for free money and screwing customers.

> it's obvious that the regulation is backwards

Not disagreeing here. However, fines are put in place as a deterrent. In this instance, their purpose is a punishment for breaking a law. Uber is treating them like a tax and the government appears to disagree with that interpretation. If this were a case of a chemical company continuing to improperly dispose of waste, i'm sure at some point you'd want the government to step in over continued violations (i.e., stop them when they are clearly not acting in 'good faith').

Improperly disposing waste is not equivalent to providing a better service cheaper and quicker.

You're right, but in both cases each company is doing the same thing, repeatedly breaking a law with no intention of stopping. Wouldn't you agree that the government has a duty to treat both cases equally?

Tell that to Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Ghandi...

Those people tried an awful lot of things before breaking the law. Uber doesn't seem to have tried very hard and just went for it.

People have tried to challenge cab monopolies for decades without any success.

that's why i used the term "usually"

Do you honestly think Uber can be compared to the civil rights movement?

Yes, because providing unlicensed taxi service is the same thing as civil rights.

First of all, the OP was making a general point about the best way to go about challenging existing laws. Since the point is general, a counter example suffice, even if it differs from the specifics of the situation being discussed. If those specifics make a difference in the OP's point, the onus of outlining why they make a difference is on the OP. This is how logical reasoning works, but every. single. time. someone points out a counter example to a general statement, there is someone like who who comes and moves the goalpost by saying "oh yeah, because X is like Y", and we're all worse off because of this lack of debating etiquette.

Second, you would be wrong to trivialize the importance of expanding the offering in cabs. Uber will go into neighborhood where Taxis don't, they can also be substantially cheaper depending on the city and the specifics. Having access to a ride late at night can mean the difference between being raped or not raped for many people living in high crime neighborhood. In addition, Uber provides a livelihood for a large number of drivers. The taxis that it compete are generally renting their license from a large company who is collecting the monopoly rent.

>Uber will go into neighborhood where Taxis don't, they can also be substantially cheaper depending on the city and the specifics. Having access to a ride late at night can mean the difference between being raped or not raped for many people living in high crime neighborhood.

This sounds like an American problem. Part of being a licensed taxi driver in Europe is that you can't refuse service in certain parts of town. Same for taxi hours. I have never not gotten a taxi by phone in Vienna.

It's not a matter of comparison, it's defending what's right.

Are you really comparing Uber to MLK, Rosa Parks, and Ghandi?

Sometimes it's exactly the best way to fix it. Have something so good and popular the law has to change.

Prohibition didn't end because people missed the taste of alcohol; it was because people kept on drinking (and the illicit nature brought with it the trappings of criminality - corruption, violence, and murder).

Gay marriage bans were hard to "ignore" because it requires cooperation with the government, but anti-sodomy laws were generally ignored until it became comical they were still on the books.

And in general, these kinds of things are the way change happens. The first people at my work switched to git on their own discretion and against the "rules", but it caught on and was productive/popular enough that it's now common practice and no managers ruffle their feathers at the thought.

The phrase is something like - "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission". That's because it's easy to say no when asked for permission ("The rules are there for a reason! Tradition!"); if someone has to think about why what you did was wrong, they may come to the conclusion that you were right.

I completely agree with your sentiment.

Though the only comparison I think fits the most with Uber is prohibition (since alcohol can be considered as a luxury, while marriage is a legal right). Don't forget though, with prohibition there was a complex underground bootlegging market funding organized crime. Also there's the whole Great Depression thing which put the whole country in need of additional revenue streams...

Oh yeah. None of this is simple black and white. My main assertion is that systems are generally trying to maintain homeostasis. In order to change the system, it's sometimes necessary is disrupt/ignore the system; especially when other means of influencing the system are denied or ineffective.

It's not as cut and dried as getting rid of licenses.

A couple of examples:

- some things that come with licenses are plausibly desirable (commercial insurance, say) and have no other mechanism. Yes this argues for a different solution.

- adding vehicles to road networks at or near capacity (e.g. dense metro areas) can lead to systemic inefficiencies that are plausibly much worse that the positives from a putative increase in taxi efficiency.

- etc.

This at least deserves a broader policy discussion, and it may well turn out that in some areas there is a public policy advantage to constraining this market.

Sure licences could be helpful, but, expectations needs to be separated from reality. Where there is power it will be abused.

It's not about adding vehicles. More ubers actually mean less vehicles since people who would otherwise drive and park all day would take an uber.

You would argue that more and more ubers would come. But uber drivers would see they wouldn't be making enough money so they wouldn't do that.

"More ubers actually mean less vehicles since people who would otherwise drive and park all day would take an uber"

That's a pretty strong claim - where I've see uber operate the vast majority of fares seem to be people who were taking taxis anyway, they just prefer uber. Do you have evidence that uber is actually eating into private car usage in any significant way in a dense metro area?

Maybe, maybe not, but the situation as-is is that you need a license to operate in that business, if you disagree with that fight to get it changed, but you can't purposefully decide not to follow the law including the fines as operating expenses when others keep abiding to the same laws, and then pretend the justice system is wrong when they apply the laws.

Defending law violations only by arguing that they make "the economy" more efficient is not very convincing.

Especially in this case since the real innovations that Uber brings in terms of ride allocation are not incompatible with paying taxes and insurance. Rather, the technical innovations of Uber appear to in themselves not be enough to actually compete with existing taxis, hence why the second innovation of actually breaking the law under the guise of technology is so important.

Uber has clearly pivoted into a taxi service, and as such it must compete on price, but somehow the fact they have an app for hailing cabs means they can be a taxi company that doesn't employ their drivers? How does that argument really work?

Transportation being cheaper and more efficient means people save time and save money. Uber has also allowed hundreds of thousands of people with an income source. _That_ is a convincing argument to me.

"Actually compete with existing taxis"

They are competing, Uber is doing 3-5x more rides in SF than the taxis as a whole were doing before Uber. That's without including Lyft. So they're expanding the market, meaning more people can afford to pay for transportation.

Indeed they are competing with existing taxi services, but not as a taxi company, but rather as a "ride share", despite providing a taxis service, and branding themselves as such.

Given that they had the choice between acting and probably-illegally, I can find no reason to act questionably except profit expectations. This in turn means that Uber can reasonable be expected to have come to the conclusion that their technological innovations alone do not provide sustainable growth in the taxi market.

My last post already addressed this but...The taxi system is not a free market, the supply was artificially restrained and prices monopolised. Hence for the Uber system to work as it does now it would be impossible to be a 'taxi company' because the laws, in effect, have outlawed a cheap and efficient means of transportation.

The SF market is proof that they are not only obliterating the former taxi market, their service is so superior that it's expanding the market 5 times.

Interesting. I read French articles that claim two drivers were arrested, not managers. http://www.europe1.fr/faits-divers/uberpop-deux-chauffeurs-e...

They are also detained for unlawful data retention (the 1981 "Information & Libertés" law, which is seen by many as very strict regarding personal data).

It seems likely they will get them either directly or indirectly (ala "AlCapone" who got caught on tax related offences, not alcohol smuggling).

Good. You don't get to just pay a fine and ignore the law because you've got the money. Would that the US followed this example and started sentencing flagrant lawbreakers to jail time.

> The standoff reflects larger tensions in France over how to regulate fast-moving technology and stay globally competitive while ensuring labour protections.

This kind of biased journalism just pisses me off. Uber has nothing to do with "fast-moving technology". They could have done this service with on old fashioned phone dispatch in the 50s and it would still be the same illegal operation.

Sure, they've added some bells and whistle, but that merely serves to disguise what it really is: offering a cheaper service by breaking multiple laws.

Uber is about breaking the law, not about technology, and I'm glad they finally get treated as the criminals they are.

Uber uses machine learning to route drivers, not dispatchers.

I think the 2 million-ish rides per day is evidence that the laws are backwards and needed to be broken. They were anti-consumer and only served to protect the taxi cartel.

Yeah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvri8hpMViM

They pay the fines and the fines are cheaper than complying with laws designed to protect monopolistic interests. You can call it illegal, but when the economics works out such that the fines for something illegal are less than the competing regulated service something needs to change.

Something like "start arresting executives"?

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