The Gray Zone of Regulation Brought by Urban Mobility Apps: An Analysis of Uber in Brazil
Year: 2018
Type: preprint
Abstract: The size and the scale of technology-driven businesses such Uber are increasingly becoming essential and part of our daily lives. Through ‘peer-to- peer’ (P2P) methodology, they provide transportation, which undoubtedly has revolutionized urban mobility. In Brazil, Uber arrived in 2014 and after four years the trade attends all the 27 states of the federation. Uber has however encountered harsh reactions by taxis drivers and their associations, which claim the company is making unfair competition. The problem is apparently that these applications are taking advantage of the lack of legal framework, a gray legal area, to explore the transportation services without appropriate rules and uniform conditions. In all Brazilian capitals, the local authorities have been trying to create a new set of rules to ban or limit the P2P mobility services however decisions from various tribunals are declaring these restrictive legislations unconstitutional. Now, the dispute is going to be decided by Supreme Court. Unlike European case, the Brazilian Judiciary has understood that prohibition of the Platform is a way to crash the Free Economy, which is a constitutional principle. This article analyzes the trajectory of Uber in Brazil and the process of it regimentation. Is an empirical study about how Brazilian states are treating this situation. Methodologically, I use the Construction of Grounded Theory to verify the trajectory of the platform in all Brazilian capitals. I investigated the legislation and judicial decisions about transportation app in each Brazilian capital to check the performance of Uber around the country, by using comparative methods. The study demonstrated three important conclusions: (i) the Uber ignores the restrictive legislations even when the local authorities clearly prohibits them. In other words, this Trade doesn’t recognize the local’s sovereignty, contesting the Rule of Law. Actually, the facts show that there is an impossible fight against the Uber in Brazil; (ii) When the local authorities promotes hard monitoring or prohibitive regulation, the local courts breaks this actions because the judicial power have considered that restrictive rules violate the Constitution. The problem here is that the courts are regulating a public service, the mobility, which is an administrative function. This fact reflects how the courts are getting crucial to decide about urban subjects. This is particularly important because Aribnb has been another technology sharing economy problem in touristic Brazilian cities; (iii) Finally, I conclude that although there are rules regulating the app, other problems emerge in the cities. The flexibilization of labor laws crates legal issues concerning the employment. In different cities Uber-drivers are realizing protests requiring better conditions in the job. At the conclusion, the design of the law currently is made to an adversarial framework, in this contest, the focus of rules that emerge to organize mobility apps is only conform the tensions between taxis and Uber-divers. This new regulations doesn’t worry neither in to find solutions to the reduce bureaucracy and the price of taxis services nor seek solutions to integrate the advantages from the sharing economy, which means that regulation alone don’t solve the problem.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Alceu Fernandes-Neto
Institution: Universidade de Brasília
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3172193340