Unsurprising Headline Of The Day

From The Daily Mail:

Taxi company Uber's low-cost carpooling service, UberPOP, is set to be banned in France from January next year, the government said.

The ruling comes after hundreds of taxi drivers blocked roads around Paris to protest what they claim are its unfair business practices.

… er, causing a massive gridlock isn't an "unfair business practice"? Sounds like typical Gallic shittiness to me. The only thing that's surprising is that the French weren't the first to ban Uber.

The new law tightening regulations for chauffeured rides will effectively ban the UberPOP service as of January 1st, Pierre-Henry Brandet, spokesman for France's Interior Ministry, said.

'Currently, people who use UberPop are not protected if there is an accident. So not only is it illegal to offer this service but for the consumer there is a real danger,' Brandet told the BFM television network.

We've heard this one before and it is completely irrelevant, it's a "Killer Argument Against Uber, Not". If the Frogs want to make it a law that it's illegal to drive a car without insurance for all passengers, paying or otherwise, well that's absolutely fine*. But how the driver and passengers first establish contact is completely irrelevant.

Also on Monday, the city government in New Delhi banned Uber from operating in the Indian capital after a passenger accused one of its drivers of rape…

New Delhi Police said they were considering legal action against Uber for failing to run background checks after it emerged the suspect was arrested for raping a woman three years ago but was later acquitted.

That's collective punishment is what that is.

The Indians might as well find out what mobile network the driver was using and shut that down as well, find out where he bought his last tank of petrol and arrest the pump attendants for aiding and abetting etc.

* IMHO this requirement for insurance is a load of nonsense. It makes sense if only a small minority have cars, but nowadays, we are nearly all either car drivers, passengers some of the time and nearly all of us are pedestrians some of the time, so we're all paying to insure each other and ourselves. Compulsory mass insurance is what governments do (however dressed up or disguised), so they might as well run it centrally and universally. That cuts down admin overheads, paperwork and saves on enforcement costs.

It's the same logic has having one national fire brigade. The fire brigade isn't really there to help the poor fool who sets fire to his own house, it is there to protect the poor fool's neighbours. Those neighbours don't need to worry about organising somebody to put out the fire, or getting sued for trespass, the fire brigade does it for them. Whether the government then wants to recover costs from the poor fool is a separate topic.