[thevalermor]

I think the situation about taxi services in Italy is absolutely peculiar.

Facts:

- Licenses are granted by the government and in theory they could not be sold. There are some loopholes in the legislation that make this possible. No government has never tried to fix this. In fact, a license in a big city like Rome is normally sold at around 200k Euros.

- By acquiring a licence, a driver can easily make in big cities between 3-4k euros net (I know people who own taxi licenses). Average salary in Italy is around 1700 Euros/month. - Various time (2006, 2012) in the last years governments have tried to increase the number of licences and reform the market. The results was riots in all big cities, traffic paralized for weeks.

- 20000 licenses represents a lot of votes. At time of election, license-holders and their families represent a large amount of votes. In cities like Rome (6k licenses), they can change the results of an election.

All this to say that at the moment, this represent an un-reformable matter and I see no way a country like Italy can be open up to any type of modernization brought by technology. Uber is trying to work around the laws for their own benefit. But as an Italian (living abroad) I would be very happy to see how city transportation would change with the advent of new players.

Now it is true the judge is only applying the laws. But the matter here is rather if the negotiations between taxi drivers and government of last month should have produced some results like a reasonable reform of the market where I personally see there is room for more then one winner, including users.

Notice that Airbnb, who has also entered the market of house rentals, has found so far much less difficulties: no lobbies to fight against, real-estate generally benefitting from this type of business.

[pmontra]

Bla Bla Car. They don't compete against taxis but I think drivers shouldn't be able to get paid without a licence. I might be wrong. Anyway, they compete against trains and flight companies which don't care about Bla Bla Car yet.

[Vik1ng]

Bla Bla Car is actual ride sharing / car pooling at least as far as I can tell. Basically you already know you want to go from A to B and are just asking others to join. At least that's how it works in Germany and how I can travel across half the country for less than 50€, because I'm not paying the driver but rather helping them pay for their gas bill.

[RobertoG]

"20000 licenses represents a lot of votes"

A lot but surely a minority of votes yet.

If this is a so big problem for the users of those services they could vote to somebody that change the system. That's how it works, isn’t?

[walterstucco]

but they are violent. 500 hundreds of them are like having a small army of 10.000 soldiers. Most of the more active and noisy are also fascist and act the same way the mob does. I'm from Rome but also lived for a long time in Milan, and I've seen with my eyes taxi drivers crash the uber app presentation and start firing tear bombs in the crowd (there were kids it was a tech fest in a city park) or read about the physical aggressions towards uber drivers (including women, three taxi drivers one night blocked and threatened a woman driving for uber and destroyed her car). Recently there's been a taxi driver's strike and those that were against the strike said they disagreed but were not going to work as well because of the threats they received. this is the real situation: mob and fascists together. uber model. sucks, gig economy sucks, but Italian taxi drivers suck a lot more.

[thevalermor]

This is how it would work in any other country maybe. 20000 licenses means a lot more than 20000 votes. And this is only one of the many lobbies.