Uber Wins Dubious Honor Of Being First Big Tech Company To Bully A Small Nation Using Corporate Sovereignty

from the welcome-to-the-ISDS-club dept

Six years ago, when Techdirt first started writing about the investor-state dispute system (ISDS) -- or corporate sovereignty as we prefer to call it -- it was largely unknown outside specialist circles. Since then, more people have woken up to the power of this apparently obscure element of international trade and investment deals. It essentially gives a foreign company the ability to threaten to sue a nation for millions -- even billions -- of dollars if the latter brings in new laws or regulations that might adversely affect an investment. The majority of corporate sovereignty cases have been brought by the extractive industries -- mining and oil. That's not least because many of the laws and regulations they object to concern environmental and health issues, which have come to the fore in recent years. New legislation designed to protect local communities might mean lower profits for investors, who then often threaten to use ISDS if they are not offered compensation for this "loss".

Big tech companies, for all their real or supposed faults, have not turned to corporate sovereignty as a way of bullying small countries -- until now. En24 News reports that Uber is threatening to invoke corporate sovereignty in a dispute with Colombia. According to Uber:

a series of recent measures by the Republic have had a serious adverse impact on Uber's investments in Colombia and the viability of its operations in the country. On December 20, 2019, for example, through the Superintendence of Industry and Commerce ("SIC"), the Republic ordered Uber, Uber Colombia, and another Uber subsidiary that will virtually cease to make the Uber Platform available of Associated Drivers and passengers in Colombia.

Uber points out:

other companies in Colombia and third countries that offer similar forms in Colombia have not undergone the same treatment and continue to operate in Colombia without similar interference from the Republic.

The company claims a wide range of harms:

The illegal order of the Republic to block the Uber Platform in Colombia also constitutes an act of censorship in contravention of international human rights instruments that protect net neutrality, freedom of expression on the internet and freedom of use of the internet.

At the moment, this is all just saber-rattling, designed to encourage the Colombian government to unblock Uber in the country. If it doesn't, the company says, it will invoke the ISDS Articles (pdf) of the 2012 United States-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, and ask a tribunal to award compensation. Even if the current threat to use corporate sovereignty is not followed through, it is surely only a matter of time before another big tech company joins the ISDS club.

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Filed Under: colombia, corporate sovereignty, free trade agreement, isds, trade agreements, trade promotion agreement
Companies: uber

Law Enforcement Agencies Bumping Up Demands For Uber Customers' Data

from the GPS-is-made-of-people dept

If it generates records -- especially third-party records -- the government is going to come asking for them.

Not only is Uber's ride-hailing service subject to a bizarre and inconsistent set of state-level regulations, it's also a storage facility containing plenty of data about people's travels. Taking an Uber may keep a rider's license plate off the ALPR radar, but the government can still track people's movements by asking Uber for customer data, which presumably includes where they traveled and when.

Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch says government agencies are taking more of an interest in Uber's data collection, according to the company's latest transparency report:

The ride-hailing company said the number of law enforcement demands for user data during 2018 are up 27% on the year earlier, according to its annual transparency report published Wednesday. Uber said the rise in demands was partly due to its business growing in size, but also a “rising interest” from governments to access data on its customers.

Uber said it received 3,825 demands for 21,913 user accounts from the U.S. government, with the company turning over some data in 72% of cases, during 2018.

This is the Golden Age of Surveillance, whether certain law enforcement figures want to admit it or not. More services require users to create accounts linked to real names and other verifiable information, like credit cards or bank accounts. Everything feeding into Uber's data pile is available without a warrant. Bank records are still obtained with subpoenas, given no additional Fourth Amendment protections by recent Supreme Court decisions hinting that when the Third (Party) meets the Fourth (Amendment), it's not as simple as it used to be.

Still, warrants are being used. The transparency report shows warrants are used about a fifth of the time. Without more granular detail, it's tough to say what law enforcement agencies feel is warrant-worthy. Subpoenas are the most popular way to obtain info with exigent circumstances ("emergency") following close behind.

There will soon be even more the government can collect from Uber. The company plans to start recording (audio only at this point) rides for driver and passenger safety. These recordings will belong to Uber, which means the government only needs to approach the company to perform post facto eavesdropping. Conversations in an Uber vehicle will become third-party records.

Maybe courts will view these as the modern equivalent of a phone booth conversation. Maybe they'll view them as non-private conversations -- the equivalent to jailhouse calls as long as riders and drivers are informed ALL CONVERSATIONS ARE RECORDED. Until then, it's a grey area law enforcement is free to explore.

Filed Under: data, government requests, ride share, surveillance, tracking
Companies: uber

Report Suggests Rampant Negligence In Uber Self Driving Car Fatality

from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept

Earlier this year you might recall that a self-driving Uber in Tempe, Arizona killed a woman who was trying to cross the street with her bike outside of a crosswalk. The driver wasn't paying attention, and the car itself failed to stop for the jaywalking pedestrian. Initial reporting on the subject, most of it based on anonymous Uber sources who spoke to the paywalled news outlet The Information, strongly pushed the idea that the car's sensors worked as intended and detected the woman, but bugs in the system software failed to properly identify the woman as something to avoid:

"The car’s sensors detected the pedestrian, who was crossing the street with a bicycle, but Uber’s software decided it didn’t need to react right away. That’s a result of how the software was tuned. Like other autonomous vehicle systems, Uber’s software has the ability to ignore “false positives,” or objects in its path that wouldn’t actually be a problem for the vehicle, such as a plastic bag floating over a road. In this case, Uber executives believe the company’s system was tuned so that it reacted less to such objects. But the tuning went too far, and the car didn’t react fast enough, one of these people said."

Thanks to that report, a narrative emerged that the vehicle largely worked as designed, and the only real problem was a modest quirk in uncooked programming.

But a new report by Bloomberg this week shatters that understanding. According to NTSB findings seen by Bloomberg, the vehicle in question wasn't even programmed to detect jaywalkers. Like, at all:

"Uber Technologies Inc.’s self-driving test car that struck and killed a pedestrian last year wasn’t programmed to recognize and react to jaywalkers, according to documents released by U.S. safety investigators."

Assuming Bloomberg's read of the 400 page report (only a part of which has been made public) is accurate, that's a far cry from a bug. The NTSB report found that Uber staff had also disabled Volvo auto-detection and breaking software that could have at least slowed the vehicle if not avoided the pedestrian impact altogether. Investigators also noted that despite the fact that Uber was conducting risky trials on public streets, the company had little to no real system in place for dealing with safety issues. Again, not just underwhelming public safety protocols, but none whatsoever:

"The Uber Advanced Technologies Group unit that was testing self-driving cars on public streets in Tempe didn’t have a standalone safety division, a formal safety plan, standard operating procedures or a manager focused on preventing accidents, according to NTSB."

Again, that's not just buggy or "poorly tuned" software, it's total negligence. Despite the fact the driver was distracted, the car was never adequately programmed to detect jaywalkers, some safety features were disabled, and Uber had little to no safety protocols in place, prosecutors have already absolved Uber of criminal liability (though the driver still may face a lawsuit). The NTSB also hasn't formally affixed blame for the crash (yet):

"The documents painted a picture of safety and design lapses with tragic consequences but didn’t assign a cause for the crash. The safety board is scheduled to do that at a Nov. 19 meeting in Washington."

Self driving cars are remarkably safe, and most accidents involve autonomous vehicles getting confused when people actually follow the law (like rear ending a human-driven vehicle that stopped at a red light before turning right). But that's only true when the people designing and conducting trials are competent. If the NTSB report is anything to go by, Uber fell well short, yet got to enjoy a lot of press suggesting the problem was random bad programming luck, not total negligence and incompetence. Later this month we'll get to see if Uber faces anything resembling accountability for its failures.

Filed Under: arizona, autonomous vehicles, jaywalkers, self driving cars, sensors, tempe
Companies: uber

Uber Takes On Beautician/Barber Over Her BeauBer Mobile App

from the portmandon't dept

There's a perception among some that the forward-looking tech companies throughout the country are more permissive in intellectual property concerns than other industries or marketplaces. And perhaps there is some truth to that. But certainly this is not without exception. For instance, you can bear witness to Uber going after a beautician over her stylist-booking app, called BeauBer.

Carolina Vengoechea, 45, tells The Post that Uber has demanded she give up the name of her beauty salon app, called “BeauBer.” But she has refused, arguing that the name is the combination of her two job titles, beautician and barber — and has nothing to do with the San Francisco-based company.

Vengoechea says she has already turned down multiple settlement offers from the $60 billion Uber, which is hell-bent on destroying trademarks that include its name. Unless the company backs down, she said, she will be forced to face them in court next year.

The fact that the portmanteau barely contains the word "uber" if you squint at it really hard is hardly any reason for Uber to have turned this into a trademark dispute. Let's just go down the list of reasons why this is ridiculous. First, these two companies are in wildly different industries. The fact that both have an app doesn't change that. Second, there is little potential for actual public confusion, given that the name in total and branding for BeauBer is quite different. Finally, the idea of Uber going after a sole proprietor in this way is ironic in the worst of ways.

Fortunately, Vengochea appears to be the rare small business owner with a backbone when it comes to trademark bullying.

“I've already spent money on BeauBer,” Vengoechea said of her app. “I feel like settling is just giving up. I know I’m not doing anything wrong. Why do I have to settle just because they have more money than me?”

Others seem to agree.

“Here, it appears that Uber has gone outside their normal zone of necessary protection and have opposed a mark which should not reasonably be opposed,” Steven Gursky, a partner at law firm Oshlan, said. “Perhaps being ‘uber’ wealthy allows them to be overly aggressive.”

Which is a shame, really. It would be rather nice if Silicon Valley companies could lead the way in having a different attitude when it comes to intellectual property issues. Apparently, though, money does in fact corrupt all things.

Filed Under: carolina vengoechea, trademark
Companies: beauber, uber

Arizona Bans Self-Driving Car Tests; Still Ignores How Many Pedestrians Get Killed

from the plenty-of-blame-to-go-around dept

By now, most folks have read about the fact that Uber (surprise) was responsible for the first ever pedestrian fatality caused by a self-driving car in the United States. Investigators in the case have found plenty of blame to go around, including a pedestrian who didn't cross at a crosswalk, an Uber driver who wasn't paying attention to the road (and therefore didn't take control in time), and Uber self-driving tech that pretty clearly wasn't ready for prime time compared to its competitors:

"Uber’s robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz.

The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber’s human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects."

All of the companies that contribute tech to Uber's test vehicle have been rushing to distance themselves from Uber's failures here. Many of them are laying the blame at the feet of Uber, including one company making it clear that Uber had disabled some standard safety features on the Volvo XC90 test car in question:

"Uber Technologies Inc. disabled the standard collision-avoidance technology in the Volvo SUV that struck and killed a woman in Arizona last week, according to the auto-parts maker that supplied the vehicle’s radar and camera.

“We don’t want people to be confused or think it was a failure of the technology that we supply for Volvo, because that’s not the case,” Zach Peterson, a spokesman for Aptiv Plc, said by phone. The Volvo XC90’s standard advanced driver-assistance system “has nothing to do” with the Uber test vehicle’s autonomous driving system, he said."

Mobileye, the company that makes the collision-avoidance technology behind Aptiv's tech, was also quick to pile on, noting that if implemented correctly, their technology should have been able to detect the pedestrian in time:

"Intel Corp.’s Mobileye, which makes chips and sensors used in collision-avoidance systems and is a supplier to Aptiv, said Monday that it tested its own software after the crash by playing a video of the Uber incident on a television monitor. Mobileye said it was able to detect Herzberg one second before impact in its internal tests, despite the poor second-hand quality of the video relative to a direct connection to cameras equipped to the car."

In response to Uber's tragic self-driving face plant, Arizona this week announced that it will be suspending Uber's self-driving testing technology in the state indefinitely:

Plenty have justly pointed out that Arizona also has plenty of culpability here, given the regulatory oversight of Uber's testing was arguably nonexistent. That said, Waymo (considered by most to be way ahead of the curve on self-driving tech) hasn't had similar problems, and there's every indication that a higher quality implementation of self-driving technology (as the various vendors above attest) may have avoided this unnecessary tragedy.

Still somehow lost in the finger pointing (including Governor Doug Ducey's "unequivocal commitment to public safety") is the fact that Arizona already had some of the highest pedestrian fatalities in the nation (of the human-caused variety). There were ten other pedestrian fatalities the same week as the Uber accident in the Phoenix area alone, and Arizona had the highest rate of pedestrian fatalities in the nation last year, clearly illustrating that Arizona has some major civil design and engineering questions of its own that need to be answered as the investigation continues.

Again, there's plenty of blame to go around here, and hopefully everybody in the chain of dysfunction learns some hard lessons from the experience. But it's still important to remember that human-piloted counterparts cause 33,000 fatalities annually, a number that should be dramatically lower when self-driving car technology is inevitably implemented (correctly).

Filed Under: arizona, autonomous vehicles, pedestrians, safety, self-driving cars
Companies: uber

Uber's Video Shows The Arizona Crash Victim Probably Didn't Cause Crash, Human Behind The Wheel Not Paying Attention

from the everyone-error dept

In the wake of a Tempe, Arizona woman being struck and killed by an Uber autonomous vehicle, there has been a flurry of information coming out about the incident. Despite that death being one of eleven in the Phoenix area alone, and the only one involving an AV, the headlines were far closer to the "Killer Car Kills Woman" sort than they should have been. Shortly after the crash, the Tempe Police Chief went on the record suggesting that the victim had at least some culpability in the incident, having walked outside of the designated crosswalk and that the entire thing would have been difficult for either human or AI to avoid.

Strangely, now that the video from Uber's onboard cameras have been released, the Tempe police are trying to walk that back and suggest that reports of the Police Chief's comments were taken out of context. That likely is the result of the video footage showing that claims that the victim "darted out" in front of the car are completely incorrect.

Contrary to earlier reports from Tempe’s police chief that Herzberg “abruptly” darted out in front of the car, the video shows her positioned in the middle of the road lane before the crash.

Based on the exterior video clip, Herzberg comes into view—walking a bicycle across the two-lane road—at least two seconds before the collision.

Analysis from Bryan Walker Smith, a professor at the University of South Carolina that has studied autonomous vehicle technology indicates that this likely represents a failure of the AVs detection systems and that there may indeed have been enough time for the collision to be avoided, if everything had worked properly.

Walker Smith pointed out that Uber’s LIDAR and radar equipment “absolutely” should’ve detected Herzberg on the road “and classified her as something other than a stationary object.”

“If I pay close attention, I notice the victim about 2 seconds before the video stops,” he said. “This is similar to the average reaction time for a driver. That means an alert driver may have at least attempted to swerve or brake.”

The problem, of course, is that AVs are in part attractive because drivers far too often are not alert. They are texting, playing with their phones, fiddling with the radio, or looking around absently. We are human, after all, and we fail to remain attentive with stunning regularaty.

So predictable is this failure, in fact, that it shouldn't surprise you all that much that the safety operator behind the wheel of this particular Uber vehicle apparently is shown in the video to have been distracted by any number of things.

A safety operator was behind the wheel, something customary in most self-driving car tests conducted on public roads, in the event the autonomous tech fails. Prior to the crash, footage shows the driver—identified as 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez—repeatedly glancing downward, and is seen looking away from the road right before the car strikes Herzberg.

So the machine might have failed. The human behind the wheel might have failed. The pedestrian may have been outside the crosswalk. These situations are as messy and complicated as we should all expect them to be. Even if the LIDAR system did not operate as expected, the human driver that critics of AVs want behind the wheel instead was there, and that didn't prevent the unfortunate death of this woman.

So, do we have our first pedestrian death by AV? Kinda? Maybe?

Should this one incident turn us completely off to AVs in general? Hell no.

Filed Under: ai, arizona, autonomous vehicles, driverless cars, pedestrians
Companies: uber

Tempe Police Chief Indicates The Uber Self-Driving Car Probably Isn't At Fault In Pedestrian Death

from the human-error dept

The internet ink has barely dried on Karl's post about an Uber self-driving vehicle striking and killing a pedestrian in Arizona, and we already have an indication from the authorities that the vehicle probably isn't to blame for the fatality. Because public relations waits for nobody, Uber suspended its autonomous vehicles in the wake of the death of a woman in Tempe, but that didn't keep fairly breathless headlines being painted all across the mainstream media. The stories that accompanied those headlines were more careful to mention that an investigation is required before anyone knows what actually happened, but the buzz created by the headlines wasn't so nuanced. I actually saw this in my own office, where several people could be heard mentioning that autonomous vehicles were now done.

But that was always silly. It's an awkward thing to say, but the fact that it took this long for AVs to strike and kill a pedestrian is a triumph of technology, given just how many people we humans kill with our cars. Hell, the Phoenix area itself had 11 pedestrian deaths by car in the last week, with only one of them being this Uber car incident. And now all of that hand-wringing is set to really look silly, as the Tempe police chief is indicating that no driver, human or AI, would likely have been able to prevent this death.

The chief of the Tempe Police has told the San Francisco Chronicle that Uber is likely not responsible for the Sunday evening crash that killed 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg.

“I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident," said Chief Sylvia Moir.

Herzberg was "pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags," according to the Chronicle's Carolyn Said, when she "abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic."

After viewing video captured by the Uber vehicle, Moir concluded that “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway."

So, once again, this tragedy has almost nothing to do with automobile AI and everything to do with human beings being faulty, complicated creatures that make mistakes. We don't need to assign blame or fault to a woman who died to admit to ourselves that not only did the self-driving car do nothing wrong in this instance, but also that it might just be true to say that the car's AI had a far better chance of avoiding a fatality than the average human driver. The car was not speeding. It did not swerve. It did not adjust its speed prior to the collision.

This obviously isn't the conclusion of the police's investigation, but when the police chief is already making these sorts of noises early on, it's reasonable to conclude that the visual evidence of what happened is pretty clear. Sadly, all this likely means is that the major media websites of the world will have to bench their misleading headlines until the next death that may or may not be the fault of a self-driving vehicle.

Filed Under: arizona, autonomous vehicles, fatalities, pedestrian, self-driving cars, tempe
Companies: uber

Pedestrian Deaths By Car In Phoenix Area Last Week: 11. But One Was By A Self-Driving Uber

from the I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept

Despite worries about the reliability and safety of self-driving vehicles, the millions of test miles driven so far have repeatedly shown self-driving cars to be significantly more safe than their human-piloted counterparts. Yet whenever accidents (or near accidents) occur, they tend to be blown completely out of proportion by those terrified of (or financially disrupted by) an automated future.

So it will be interesting to watch the reaction to news that a self-driving Uber vehicle was, unfortunately, the first to be involved in a fatality over the weekend in Tempe, Arizona:

"A self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, Sunday night, according to the Tempe police. The department is investigating the crash. A driver was behind the wheel at the time, the police said.

"The vehicle involved is one of Uber's self-driving vehicles," the Tempe police said in a statement. "It was in autonomous mode at the time of the collision, with a vehicle operator behind the wheel."

Uber, for its part, says it's working with Tempe law enforcement to understand what went wrong in this instance:

Bloomberg also notes that Uber has suspended its self-driving car program nationwide until it can identify what exactly went wrong. The National Transportation Safety Board is also opening an investigation into the death and is sending a small team of investigators to Tempe.

We've noted for years now how despite a lot of breathless hand-wringing, self-driving car technology (even in its beta form) has proven to be remarkably safe. Millions of AI driver miles have been logged already by Google, Volvo, Uber and others with only a few major accidents. When accidents do occur, they most frequently involve human beings getting confused when a robot-driven vehicle actually follows the law. Google has noted repeatedly that the most common accidents it sees are when drivers rear end its AI-vehicles because they actually stopped before turning right on red.

And while there's some caveats for this data (such as the fact that many of these miles are logged with drivers grabbing the wheel when needed), self-driving cars have so far proven to be far safer then even many advocates projected. We've not even gotten close to the well-hyped "trolly problem," and engineers have argued that if we do, somebody has already screwed up in the design and development process.

It's also worth reiterating that early data continues to strongly indicate that self-driving cars will be notably safer than their human-piloted counterparts, who cause 33,000 fatalities annually (usually because they were drunk or distracted by their phone). It's also worth noting that 10 pedestrians have been killed by drivers in the Phoenix area (including Tempe) in the last week alone by human drivers, and Arizona had the highest rate of pedestrian fatalities in the country last year. And it's getting worse, with 197 Arizona pedestrian deaths in 2016 compared to 224 in 2017.

We'll have to see what the investigation reveals, but hopefully the tech press will view Arizona's problem in context before writing up their inevitable hyperventilating hot takes. Ditto for lawmakers eager to justify over-regulating the emerging self-driving car industry at the behest of taxi unions or other disrupted legacy sectors. If we are going to worry about something, those calories might be better spent on shoring up the abysmal security and privacy standards in the auto industry before automating everything under the sun.

Filed Under: accidents, autonomous vehicles, pedestrian fatalities, self-driving cars
Companies: uber

Waymo And Uber's Settlement Is A Good Thing: Focus On Innovating, Not Litigating

from the took-too-long-already dept

Back in December, right before the Waymo/Uber trial was supposed to begin (before it got delayed due to an unexpected bombshell about withholding evidence that... never actually came up at the trial), I had a discussion with another reporter about the case, in which we each expressed our surprise that a settlement hadn't been worked out before going to trial. It seemed as though part of the case was really about the two companies really disliking each other, rather than there being a really strong legal case.

A year ago, when the case was filed, I expressed disappointment at seeing Google filing this kind of lawsuit. My concern was mainly over the patent part of the case (which were dropped pretty early on), and the fact that Google, historically, had shied away from suing competitors over patents, tending to mostly use them defensively. But I had concerns about the "trade secrets" parts of the case as well. While there does seem to be fairly clear evidence that Anthony Levandowski -- the ex-Google employee at the heart of the discussion -- did some sketchy things in the process of leaving Google, starting Otto, and quickly selling Otto to Uber, the case still felt a lot like a backdoor attempt to hold back employee mobility.

As we've discussed for many years, a huge part of the reason for the success of Silicon Valley in dominating the innovation world has to do with the ease of employee mobility. Repeated studies have shown that the fact that employees can switch jobs easily, or start their own companies easily, is a key factor in driving innovation forward. It's the sharing and interplay of ideas that allows the entire industry to tackle big problems. Individual firms may compete around those big breakthroughs, but it's the combined knowledge, ideas, and perspective sharing that results in the big breakthroughs.

And even though that's widely known, tech companies have an unfortunate history of trying to stop employees from going to competitors. While non-competes have been ruled out in California, a few years back there was a big scandal over tech companies having illegal handshake agreements not to poach employees from one another. It was a good thing to see the companies fined for such practices.

However, the latest move is to use "trade secrets" claims as way to effectively get the same thing done. The mere threat of lawsuits can stop companies from hiring employees, and can limit an employee's ability to find a new job somewhere else. That should concern us all.

However, in this lawsuit, everything was turned a bit upside down. Part of it was that there did appear to be some outrageous behavior by Levandowski. Part of it was that, frankly, there are few companies out there disliked as much as Uber. It does seem that if it were almost any other company on the planet, many more people would have been rooting against Google as the big incumbent suing a smaller competitor. But, in this case, many many people seemed to be rooting for Google out of a general dislike of Uber itself.

My own fear was that this general idea of "Uber = bad" combined with "Levandowski doing sketchy things" could lead to a bad ruling which would then be used to limit employee mobility in much more sympathetic settings. Thankfully, that seems unlikely to happen. As Sarah Jeong (who's coverage of this case was absolutely worth following) noted, despite all the rhetoric, it wasn't at all clear that Waymo proved its case. Lots of people wanted Google/Waymo to win for emotional reasons, but the legal evidence wasn't clearly there.

And now the case is over. As the trial was set to continue Friday morning, it was announced that the two parties had reached a settlement, in which Uber basically hands over a small chunk of equity to Waymo (less than Waymo first tried to get, but still significant). As Jeong notes in another article, both sides had ample reasons to settle -- but the best reason of all to settle is so that they can focus on just competing in the market, rather than the courtroom and in not setting bad and dangerous precedent concerning employee mobility in an industry where that's vital.

Filed Under: anthony levendowski, autonomous vehicles, competition, employee mobility, innovation, patents, self driving cars, settlement, trade secrets, travis kalanik
Companies: google, otto, uber, waymo

Top EU Court Says Uber Is A Transport Service That Can Be Regulated Like Traditional Taxis

from the if-it-looks-like-a-duck,-swims-like-a-duck,-and-quacks-like-a-duck,-then-it-prob dept

Uber is a company that provokes strong emotions, as numerous stories on Techdirt indicate. Uber has been involved in some pretty bad situations, including inappropriate behavior, special apps to hide from regulators, and massive leaks of customer information. Despite this, it is undeniable that millions of people around the world love the convenience and competitive pricing of its service.

Equally, traditional taxi services dislike it for the way Uber flouts transports regulations that they obey, which is fair enough, and hate it for the way Uber challenges their often lazy monopolies, which is not. This has led to some appalling violence in some countries, as well as numerous legal actions. One of those, instituted by a professional taxi drivers' association in Spain, has resulted in a case before the EU's highest court (pdf), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which has just ruled as follows:

the Court declares that an intermediation service such as that at issue in the main proceedings, the purpose of which is to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys, must be regarded as being inherently linked to a transport service and, accordingly, must be classified as 'a service in the field of transport' within the meaning of EU law.

The CJEU's reasoning was that Uber is more than a simple intermediation service. Its smartphone app is "indispensable" for the process of agreeing to deals between the driver and the customer, and Uber exercises "decisive influence over the conditions under which the drivers provide their service." As a result, the CJEU ruled that Uber is not "an information society service", but a "service in the field of transport", and may therefore be regulated just like traditional taxi services.

In practice, this means that Uber will be able to operate in the EU, but will be unable to continue with its swashbuckling approach that has seen it ignore many traditional requirements for taxi services. That result will be important for its knock-on effect on other services offered as part of the so-called "sharing economy". In fact, these are better described as new kinds of rental services, and like Uber they have often skirted around existing laws that cover their field of operation. The CJEU ruling, which can't be appealed, is likely to mean that other companies using online technology to provide such services will also need to obey relevant EU laws.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: cjeu, eu, regulations, ride sharing, taxi
Companies: uber