[kuschku]

But it only costs 250€ to become a "chaffeur for hire", where people can call you and you drive them to whereever you want.

Which is legally what uber is.

Uber just didn’t want to pay insurance fees.

[viscanti]

Or is it the 0.86% success rate for getting those licenses that was the limiting factor? http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2015/07/03/uber-annon...

It appears that the licensing process is set to only accept a very small amount of the total applicants. That way politicians and taxi owners have something to point to about how it's a level playing field, and they leave things to a black box bureaucratic process to actually stifle competition.

[kuschku]

that’s different – that’s the taxi license.

Uber does not operate as taxi, but, as they can be not directly hailed from the street, they act as chauffeur for hire.