The ruling comes after months of debates, strikes and complaints from taxi drivers, which had led the popular (across the Atlantic) service to become illegal in many European countries.
The European Court of Justice has ruled: Uber is a taxi service in every respect and not a digital intermediation platform. This means the company must be regulated as such, and not as a simple app providing a service to its users.
The ruling comes after a Barcelona taxi drivers' association, the Asociación Profesional Elite Taxi, took the San Francisco-based company to court in 2014 for unfair competition. At that point the Spanish court referred the matter to the European Court of Justice, which in turn ruled that Uber must "be regarded as inextricably linked to a transport service and therefore falling within the classification of 'service in the field of transport', within the meaning of EU law".
Following the ruling by the EU's highest court, each member state will now be free to regulate the service as it sees fit, subject in any case to national law on the carriage of passengers and private hire vehicles. The Court indeed emphasises that Uber must "be excluded from the scope of the freedom to provide services in general, as well as from the directive on services in the internal market and the directive on electronic commerce".
The company responds in a statement that the ruling "will not change things in most EU countries". According to Uber, "we already operate under transport law, yet millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours". The company suspended its services in Finland and Norway over the summer in order to relaunch under new transport regulations. In France and Germany it operates as a transport service, while it operates without a licence only in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania.
To date, Uber Pop — the service that allowed anyone to become a driver and offer rides to other users in exchange for payment, at prices more competitive than those of equivalent taxis — has been illegal since the ruling by the Milan court in 2015. Meanwhile, a ruling by the Rome court last February allows Uber Black (one of the many offshoots of the transport service), UberLux and UberTour to operate in Italy as a private hire service in just two cities: Rome and Milan.
The company nonetheless says it is willing to operate in accordance with the rules: "The time has come to regulate services like Uber," the company continues in a statement, "and that is why we will continue the dialogue with cities across Europe, with the aim of ensuring everyone has access to a reliable service at the click of a button." The fact remains that in Italy there is a regulatory vacuum — an anachronistic one, given that the law being referred to dates back to 1992, a year in which Uber did not exist (it only arrived in Italy in 2014), smartphones did not exist, apps did not exist, and the so-called sharing economy had not even been conceived by those who, decades later, would bring it into being.
