Lis Uber different from what the ‘Uber Files’ reveal – these 124,000 internal documents dated from 2013 to 2017 sent to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, a former employee turned whistleblower, then shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 42 media partners, including The world ?
Yes and no. Since 2017, the company has seen many changes (new CEO, new management, different internal culture), but it has remained the same on one essential point: that of opposing the laws wherever it operates. Because this “contentious compliance” strategy (litigation compliance) is at the heart of the company’s mode of growth (“The politics of Uber: Infrastructural power in the United States and Europe”Jimena Valdez, Regulation & GovernanceFebruary 3, 2022).
The more essential Uber becomes to our lives, the more powerful it becomes. When the company enters a market and begins to offer its services, it becomes known to a variety of actors: drivers, consumers, and even government, and becomes increasingly important to them.
Exploit legal gray areas
Drivers depend on it for their livelihood, consumers rely on its availability and reliability, and the public sector appreciates it for various reasons (a supposedly ‘cool’ and modern service, access to mobility data, a substitute for the public transport service, among others). In the long run, Uber becomes indispensable to our lives, and we can no longer imagine living without it!
Because making its services indispensable is the key to its power, the company must develop at all costs when it establishes itself somewhere. Initially, it simply ignores the law, or exploits legal gray areas – which Uber executives have acknowledged in leaked internal messages, joking that they are “pirate” and “illegal”.
But, then, the company adapts to the regulations in force to offer its passenger transport service by drivers holding a driving license driving vehicles that comply with the specific authorizations provided for this purpose (in other words, a taxi at the era of smartphones…).
Lobby for further changes to the law
However, the regulations vary from one country to another and even from one city to another; that’s why Uber doesn’t work the same way everywhere. In other words, the “technological breakthrough” proclaimed by the company is neither homogeneous (it does not take a single form) nor inevitable (it can be shaped by regulation).
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