Last week the Chamber of Law, Agriculture and Rural Appeal The Supreme Court has finalized the case filed by Taxis Libres’ Cotech against Uber Declaring the passenger transport platform in question as ‘illegal competition’.
Argument? That it violated public transport service rules and was intended to ‘manipulate’ taxi customers.
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Although the decision is to reaffirm the 2020 decision of the Bogota Court, which showed that taxi drivers delayed filing a lawsuit against Uber (that is, overturned everything due to an official fact), it is worth it. Analyzing some additional details that the court mentioned in its summary and covering the entire digital economy model.
According to the court, the first of these is the following warning: collaborative economy platforms have “profoundly changed competition” in different economic sectors; and it is a guarantee of a principle to which this State is called, not only because of the disruption faced by traditional companies, but also because of the constant existence of new practices that compete with each other: the guarantee of free competition for the benefit of citizens.
Going further: The Supreme Court therefore argued that a technological advance “It cannot be classified as an unfair means of manipulating customers, because this would ignore a human right recognized by many international instruments: to benefit from technological advances and scientific progress.”
(You may be interested: Supreme Court reopens debate; mobility applications need rules)
A wonderful door has been slammed on the argument that technology is to blame, as some taxi drivers try to point out (less and less, thank God), by demanding brutality, for example, the obstruction of operators and the Ministry of ICT. Uber and other transportation apps.
In this sense, The decision emphasizes that creativity and innovation are “valid advantages” and should be understood as “virtues” of the trader Whoever creates them, instead of being violators of competition rules, which the court deliberately and correctly described as not taxi accumulators and their overvalued quotas, but “obliged to produce results for the benefit of users and consumers”; It is rented to drivers without social security and under an exploitative ‘contract’ model.
To be fair, not all taxi drivers or car owners are like this, that’s also true.
The devastating call that this Division of the Court makes in its decision is the devastating call it makes to other administrators of justice when faced with these lawsuits brought by taxi drivers against transport practices: Do the rules allegedly violated apply to the current state of innovation or are they obsolete?
Boom! In short, the Supreme Court of Justice seems to achieve everything that ministries, senators, congressmen, vice presidents cannot achieve.
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Source: Exame
