7 ms·

French court fines Uber, execs for illegal taxi service

66 points by flexie 10y ago

spriggan3 10y ago
This was a criminal prosecution, so the execs will end up with a criminal record if they don't win their appeal though they won't go to jail. No need to say that with a criminal conviction in France, unless you have friends in high places, your management career is over. They didn't design these disruptive policies, they obeyed the higher up exec in San Fransisco. Is it really worth risking a criminal record that won't go away for Uber ? I don't know... I hope Uber will reward them for their "loyalty" .
- athrun 10y ago
  I don't see why their management career would be over. Especially if they are looking at management opportunities at US companies operating in France. This is an industry I know well and certainly some of the FR country managers of US tech companies have shady pasts. In a sales-driven organisation this is usually seen positively as some sort of war wound (ie: this is a man ready to do what's necessary).
- stale2002 10y ago
  Lol, are joking? All the managers would have to do is explain the situation of why they have a "criminal record". These aren't low level cogs at the company. No employer who is looking to hire one of these people would bat an eye at the "criminal record".
  - dnate 10y ago
    completely agree. I don't know why you are being downvoted
- legulere 10y ago
  Just because you follow orders from higher up doesn't mean that you are exempt from the law or don't need to do your own moral judgements.
philfrasty 10y ago
"...two managers....guilty of deceptive commercial practices and being accomplices in operating an illegal transportation service and violating privacy laws..." Is this something that shows up in your personal criminal record? Or hurts the managers personally any other way? Reason I am asking is because usually there is a clear legal separation between the legal-entity (company) and the people working for it. For example the legal-entity might go bankrupt but the people running it do not.
- ianferrel 10y ago
  There's a liability separation, which is different. Failing to make a profit is not against the law. If you do things that are against the law while working for a company, that doesn't give you any protection. You could not, for example, set up an assassination corporation and expect that the company would take the blame.
- kenshaw 10y ago
  I'm sure being head of country for a company that will likely IPO above $100 billion will be fine for their careers.
remh 10y ago
Execs, Managers, etc. should be sent to jail when they break the law deliberately. Fines are not enough as if the benefit of breaking the law is higher than the fine, then there is no incentive to stop. We've seen that happening with all the big corp cartels that just provision money from those benefits to pay the eventual fine. The fact that the French Law here may be bad or wrong is not relevant to this point.
- shit_parade2 10y ago
  Of course it's relevant you dump fuck. Or you think by being law it becomes just? Go check out how just the Holocaust was you fucking Nazi.
- shit_parade2 10y ago
  Of course it's relevant you dump fuck. Or you think by being law it becomes just? Go check out how just the Holocaust was you fucking Nazi.
- hivjjbhhh 10y ago
  Of course it's relevant, unless you believe law is intrinsically just -- an obvious fallacy for anyone with a brain and a heart.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Fines are okay, just make them larger. Jail for managers should be reserved for situations where people have serious damages. It would be appropriate for certain bank malfeasance, but not for violating taxi regulations. Maybe a token amount for non-serious damages, like a month. Shame should be effective here.
  - Retric 10y ago
    This is a little past simple violation of a regulation. This is acting like your above the law which is generally dealt with much more harshly.
    - 10y ago
shitgoose 10y ago
We should admire the selfless relentlessness of French government trying to protect us from ourselves.
- ciconia 10y ago
  It's not the French government, rather French law, and arguably French values. I've been living in France for the last 3 years and have come to deeply appreciate their tenaciousness when it comes to labour relations and worker rights. As for the ruling, it's worth noting that the demand for material damage of the civil parties in the case, notably taxi driver unions, totalling some 114M€, have been rejected, while the court did accord the 5.2M€ in moral damage[0]. [0] http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/06/09/uberpop-800-000-euros-d-amende_4944820_3234.html http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/06/09/uberpop-80...
  - LanceH 10y ago
    some worker's rights.
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Indeed, the workers who already have safe jobs have protection and 36 hour work weeks while the 10.3% of the population who are unemployed are locked out.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        And the alternative would be what? Like the US, everyone working 60h work weeks and still earning not more than unemployment benefits? (looking at Walmart, Uber, etc... yup)
        JBReefer 10y ago
        "Everyone" is a giant stretch, there. Are you American? I promise that midtown-bound subway is not full of people going to work at McDonalds. The vast majority of people have white-collar, good benefit jobs. Probably more than the French when you count in the unemployed and the unwelcome in the banlieues.
drakonandor 10y ago
> The court said in its ruling that UberPOP had caused a "durable disruption" of the transport sector, provoking violent protests by taxi drivers that had disturbed public order. Fine Uber because taxi drivers are violent? makes sense.
- philjohn 10y ago
  No, they were fined because they decided to enter a tightly regulated market without gaining the necessary permits and permission, and following the requisite rules. Not saying it's right that the industry is regulated, and it's certainly not right that the French Taxi drivers resorted to violence, but if you want to operate in a country, you have to abide by their rules, it's called the cost of doing business. Now, there's nothing to stop them lobbying for change of course.
  - fennecfoxen 10y ago
    More broadly, they were fined because of the European and especially French culture of the left wing where a business generally owns their customers and an employee owns his job. How dare you liberate these consumers by offering them a choice? They are OURS. Doubly so because Uber is so terribly un-French. We will have our friends in the government protect ourselves from this theft. Mind you, it's not as bad as, say, the teachers in Mexico who can sell their job to someone else, but... it has an impact on the economy, and it's a major reason youth unemployment is so high (and a contributing factor to why immigrant communities can't integrate, which is a contributing factor to the security situation over there...)
    - WizKid 10y ago
      No they were fined because they broke the rules. If they don't agree with the rules they need to get them changed first. They just pretended they didn't exists in hope that they rules was going to be changed
      - chillacy 10y ago
rvanniekerk 10y ago
Personal anecdote, of course, but Uber saved my ass while I was in Europe (specifically Paris and Madrid). Immediately upon arriving via train to Paris from London we were harassed by a number of sketchy looking individuals claiming to be "taxi" drivers, of course not speaking French I really had no way to validate the claims, they all became hostile towards me the minute I took my camera out. I resorted to opening the Uber app and lo and behold had a validated ride within minutes. The service was exceptional and they even spoke English relatively well. Fast forward 24 hours, I thought I had booked a flight out of the airport in the city about 20 mins drive, turns out my flight was actually out of the airport much further north of Paris. I rushed to get an Uber and my driver was extremely friendly and not only brought me to the exact bus station I needed to be at, also showed me exactly which ticket to purchase and where to wait. Never in my life have I received close to that level of service from a taxi driver. A couple weeks later in Madrid we found ourselves pretty far away from our flat, not well equipped for the weather and ready to head back. We saw several advertisements for the local taxi services "ride sharing" app and decided to give it a shot. After jumping between a couple starbucks to find reasonable wifi, we ordered a taxi and proceeded to wait 20+ minutes for a driver to finally show up in the app as our pickup, however, the actual taxi was nowhere to be found. No text / call / messages in the app ever succeeded. Once again we resorted to Uber and had a painless experience. I guess my point overall is that Uber offers a familiar service no matter what country I happen to be in. It's simply not viable for a foreigner to arrive in a new country, find out what ride sharing taxi service is allowed existence there, download the app, finagle my way through the most-likely non english friendly sign-up process and enter my personal banking details only to find out the service doesn't even work for whatever reason. Don't get me wrong, I love traveling to new places and truly exploring a city without all the luxuries and convenience of home, but when I arrive in a new place with expensive items in tow, I'd MUCH rather pay for the convenience of a safe and familiar ride to get to my destination then risk getting scammed or taken advantage of otherwise, I also don't always arrive with local currency in tow and don't like paying exorbitant fees at major transport hubs.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  > I guess my point overall is that Uber offers a familiar service no matter what country I happen to be in. This is exactly why I use it as well. I see advertisements for a local "taxi app", and ignore them because I have no expectation of consistency. I can expect that Uber will work the same way with the same level of quality everywhere.
kartan 10y ago
Why does people think that software is beyond the law? The secret services think that reading electronic communications is ok when the physical counterpart was not. A company thinks that because they offer their services using and app they are beyond regulations, permits and other laws. No, laws still should apply in the virtual world. And apps and the Internet have real world consequences. It's a shame that judges often are so slow to apply the law in this cases. And that so often they miss the point. Now Uber should just do what any bricks and mortar business needs to do and get a license, operate inside the boundaries of the law and compete with taxis in a fair way to bring people good services.
- roymurdock 10y ago
  The law is not immutable. It's an evolving code of moral/social expectations and norms that changes as societies change. At the end of the day, this was a business decision. Uber weighed the potential costs ($1m in fines, no jail time, minor brand damage to an already-sleazy brand) against the potential gain ($10's of m in revenue, foothold in new market, disruption of competitors) and decided to break the law. If "society" did not want Uber to break the law, it would need to raise the associated costs. Almost everyone besides taxi driver unions/medallion-holders is apathetic to Uber's transgressions. Thus the taxi unions are weakened and the law changes to reflect changing social sentiment.
- chillacy 10y ago
  > compete with taxis in a fair way to bring people good services I'd argue that taxi companies being so deeply entrenched into the government is unfair for any startup in the space. The boundaries of the law are rigged in the taxi company's favor.
moribondus 10y ago
The peer-2-peer mechanism is well understood now. Its economics have clearly been declared perfectly viable. Therefore, you could have hundreds of Uber-style networks with a few cross-network search engines returning search results. That would have exactly the same effect as having just one Uber. Transport services are important to the economy. We must always encourage swarmification of our critical infrastructure. Furthermore, in a related case, we should be grateful that the powers that be attacked Napster and shut it down. Decentralization takes a lot of effort and is not just a natural outcome. The far-reaching decentralization of the bittorrent ecosystem only came about thanks to the continuous legal attacks that made it the only solution possible. Therefore, I advocate sustained legal and other attacks on Uber. We do not want a centralized system. We will need the attacks orchestrated by the state apparatus to properly shape a much more decentralized solution.

66 points by flexie 10y ago

This was a criminal prosecution, so the execs will end up with a criminal record if they don't win their appeal though they won't go to jail. No need to say that with a criminal conviction in France, unless you have friends in high places, your management career is over. They didn't design these disruptive policies, they obeyed the higher up exec in San Fransisco. Is it really worth risking a criminal record that won't go away for Uber ? I don't know... I hope Uber will reward them for their "loyalty" .

athrun 10y ago
I don't see why their management career would be over. Especially if they are looking at management opportunities at US companies operating in France. This is an industry I know well and certainly some of the FR country managers of US tech companies have shady pasts. In a sales-driven organisation this is usually seen positively as some sort of war wound (ie: this is a man ready to do what's necessary).
stale2002 10y ago
Lol, are joking? All the managers would have to do is explain the situation of why they have a "criminal record". These aren't low level cogs at the company. No employer who is looking to hire one of these people would bat an eye at the "criminal record".
- dnate 10y ago
  completely agree. I don't know why you are being downvoted
legulere 10y ago
Just because you follow orders from higher up doesn't mean that you are exempt from the law or don't need to do your own moral judgements.

philfrasty 10y ago

"...two managers....guilty of deceptive commercial practices and being accomplices in operating an illegal transportation service and violating privacy laws..." Is this something that shows up in your personal criminal record? Or hurts the managers personally any other way? Reason I am asking is because usually there is a clear legal separation between the legal-entity (company) and the people working for it. For example the legal-entity might go bankrupt but the people running it do not.

ianferrel 10y ago
There's a liability separation, which is different. Failing to make a profit is not against the law. If you do things that are against the law while working for a company, that doesn't give you any protection. You could not, for example, set up an assassination corporation and expect that the company would take the blame.
kenshaw 10y ago
I'm sure being head of country for a company that will likely IPO above $100 billion will be fine for their careers.

remh 10y ago

Execs, Managers, etc. should be sent to jail when they break the law deliberately. Fines are not enough as if the benefit of breaking the law is higher than the fine, then there is no incentive to stop. We've seen that happening with all the big corp cartels that just provision money from those benefits to pay the eventual fine. The fact that the French Law here may be bad or wrong is not relevant to this point.

shit_parade2 10y ago
Of course it's relevant you dump fuck. Or you think by being law it becomes just? Go check out how just the Holocaust was you fucking Nazi.
shit_parade2 10y ago
Of course it's relevant you dump fuck. Or you think by being law it becomes just? Go check out how just the Holocaust was you fucking Nazi.
hivjjbhhh 10y ago
Of course it's relevant, unless you believe law is intrinsically just -- an obvious fallacy for anyone with a brain and a heart.
Dylan16807 10y ago
Fines are okay, just make them larger. Jail for managers should be reserved for situations where people have serious damages. It would be appropriate for certain bank malfeasance, but not for violating taxi regulations. Maybe a token amount for non-serious damages, like a month. Shame should be effective here.
- Retric 10y ago
  This is a little past simple violation of a regulation. This is acting like your above the law which is generally dealt with much more harshly.
  - 10y ago

shitgoose 10y ago

We should admire the selfless relentlessness of French government trying to protect us from ourselves.

ciconia 10y ago
It's not the French government, rather French law, and arguably French values. I've been living in France for the last 3 years and have come to deeply appreciate their tenaciousness when it comes to labour relations and worker rights. As for the ruling, it's worth noting that the demand for material damage of the civil parties in the case, notably taxi driver unions, totalling some 114M€, have been rejected, while the court did accord the 5.2M€ in moral damage[0]. [0] http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/06/09/uberpop-800-000-euros-d-amende_4944820_3234.html http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/06/09/uberpop-80...
- LanceH 10y ago
  some worker's rights.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    Indeed, the workers who already have safe jobs have protection and 36 hour work weeks while the 10.3% of the population who are unemployed are locked out.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      And the alternative would be what? Like the US, everyone working 60h work weeks and still earning not more than unemployment benefits? (looking at Walmart, Uber, etc... yup)
      - JBReefer 10y ago
        "Everyone" is a giant stretch, there. Are you American? I promise that midtown-bound subway is not full of people going to work at McDonalds. The vast majority of people have white-collar, good benefit jobs. Probably more than the French when you count in the unemployed and the unwelcome in the banlieues.

drakonandor 10y ago

> The court said in its ruling that UberPOP had caused a "durable disruption" of the transport sector, provoking violent protests by taxi drivers that had disturbed public order. Fine Uber because taxi drivers are violent? makes sense.

philjohn 10y ago
No, they were fined because they decided to enter a tightly regulated market without gaining the necessary permits and permission, and following the requisite rules. Not saying it's right that the industry is regulated, and it's certainly not right that the French Taxi drivers resorted to violence, but if you want to operate in a country, you have to abide by their rules, it's called the cost of doing business. Now, there's nothing to stop them lobbying for change of course.
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  More broadly, they were fined because of the European and especially French culture of the left wing where a business generally owns their customers and an employee owns his job. How dare you liberate these consumers by offering them a choice? They are OURS. Doubly so because Uber is so terribly un-French. We will have our friends in the government protect ourselves from this theft. Mind you, it's not as bad as, say, the teachers in Mexico who can sell their job to someone else, but... it has an impact on the economy, and it's a major reason youth unemployment is so high (and a contributing factor to why immigrant communities can't integrate, which is a contributing factor to the security situation over there...)
  - WizKid 10y ago
    No they were fined because they broke the rules. If they don't agree with the rules they need to get them changed first. They just pretended they didn't exists in hope that they rules was going to be changed
    - chillacy 10y ago

rvanniekerk 10y ago

Personal anecdote, of course, but Uber saved my ass while I was in Europe (specifically Paris and Madrid). Immediately upon arriving via train to Paris from London we were harassed by a number of sketchy looking individuals claiming to be "taxi" drivers, of course not speaking French I really had no way to validate the claims, they all became hostile towards me the minute I took my camera out. I resorted to opening the Uber app and lo and behold had a validated ride within minutes. The service was exceptional and they even spoke English relatively well. Fast forward 24 hours, I thought I had booked a flight out of the airport in the city about 20 mins drive, turns out my flight was actually out of the airport much further north of Paris. I rushed to get an Uber and my driver was extremely friendly and not only brought me to the exact bus station I needed to be at, also showed me exactly which ticket to purchase and where to wait. Never in my life have I received close to that level of service from a taxi driver. A couple weeks later in Madrid we found ourselves pretty far away from our flat, not well equipped for the weather and ready to head back. We saw several advertisements for the local taxi services "ride sharing" app and decided to give it a shot. After jumping between a couple starbucks to find reasonable wifi, we ordered a taxi and proceeded to wait 20+ minutes for a driver to finally show up in the app as our pickup, however, the actual taxi was nowhere to be found. No text / call / messages in the app ever succeeded. Once again we resorted to Uber and had a painless experience. I guess my point overall is that Uber offers a familiar service no matter what country I happen to be in. It's simply not viable for a foreigner to arrive in a new country, find out what ride sharing taxi service is allowed existence there, download the app, finagle my way through the most-likely non english friendly sign-up process and enter my personal banking details only to find out the service doesn't even work for whatever reason. Don't get me wrong, I love traveling to new places and truly exploring a city without all the luxuries and convenience of home, but when I arrive in a new place with expensive items in tow, I'd MUCH rather pay for the convenience of a safe and familiar ride to get to my destination then risk getting scammed or taken advantage of otherwise, I also don't always arrive with local currency in tow and don't like paying exorbitant fees at major transport hubs.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
> I guess my point overall is that Uber offers a familiar service no matter what country I happen to be in. This is exactly why I use it as well. I see advertisements for a local "taxi app", and ignore them because I have no expectation of consistency. I can expect that Uber will work the same way with the same level of quality everywhere.

kartan 10y ago

Why does people think that software is beyond the law? The secret services think that reading electronic communications is ok when the physical counterpart was not. A company thinks that because they offer their services using and app they are beyond regulations, permits and other laws. No, laws still should apply in the virtual world. And apps and the Internet have real world consequences. It's a shame that judges often are so slow to apply the law in this cases. And that so often they miss the point. Now Uber should just do what any bricks and mortar business needs to do and get a license, operate inside the boundaries of the law and compete with taxis in a fair way to bring people good services.

roymurdock 10y ago
The law is not immutable. It's an evolving code of moral/social expectations and norms that changes as societies change. At the end of the day, this was a business decision. Uber weighed the potential costs ($1m in fines, no jail time, minor brand damage to an already-sleazy brand) against the potential gain ($10's of m in revenue, foothold in new market, disruption of competitors) and decided to break the law. If "society" did not want Uber to break the law, it would need to raise the associated costs. Almost everyone besides taxi driver unions/medallion-holders is apathetic to Uber's transgressions. Thus the taxi unions are weakened and the law changes to reflect changing social sentiment.
chillacy 10y ago
> compete with taxis in a fair way to bring people good services I'd argue that taxi companies being so deeply entrenched into the government is unfair for any startup in the space. The boundaries of the law are rigged in the taxi company's favor.

moribondus 10y ago

The peer-2-peer mechanism is well understood now. Its economics have clearly been declared perfectly viable. Therefore, you could have hundreds of Uber-style networks with a few cross-network search engines returning search results. That would have exactly the same effect as having just one Uber. Transport services are important to the economy. We must always encourage swarmification of our critical infrastructure. Furthermore, in a related case, we should be grateful that the powers that be attacked Napster and shut it down. Decentralization takes a lot of effort and is not just a natural outcome. The far-reaching decentralization of the bittorrent ecosystem only came about thanks to the continuous legal attacks that made it the only solution possible. Therefore, I advocate sustained legal and other attacks on Uber. We do not want a centralized system. We will need the attacks orchestrated by the state apparatus to properly shape a much more decentralized solution.