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Is language the new front for regulators in the battle against Uber?

A person uses the Uber app while seated behind the wheel of a car. (Digital Trends)
A person uses the Uber app while seated behind the wheel of a car. (Digital Trends)

Language has become the latest battleground for regulators looking to monitor the slow creep of ride-sharing and driver-hire platforms like Uber.

The San Francisco-based company is suing the City of London in the U.K. over new regulations from Transport for London (TfL), the city’s transport authority, including one requiring private-hire drivers coming from a non-English speaking majority country to pass a language test.

“We support spoken English skills, but this exam is harder than the test for British citizenship,” wrote Alana Saltzman, Uber UK and Ireland spokesperson, in an emailed response to Yahoo Canada Finance. (Uber Canada did not respond to repeated requests).

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While the English proficiency has gained the lion’s share media coverage, the tech company cites three other grievances including the requirement for “hire and reward” insurance even when vehicles aren’t in use, the requirement to inform TfL of changes to their operating model “before they are made” and a rule that will require Uber to establish a call centre in London.

Andreas Schotter, assistant professor of international business and global strategy at Western University’s Ivey Business School says he’s study the model and tested it out in Asia, Europe and throughout North America and found that localness has a profound impact on the app and how it’s received. And perhaps, more importantly, how regulators perceive it.

“The City of London went too far,” he says. “My projection of what will happen is Uber will sue, there might be a compromise on the language test and then it keeps on going.”

But he admits that Uber has shown overconfidence when going into these cities and the effect it may have – in other words: they need to “respect the regulator.”

“The regulator in this case has to both protect the incumbent and have control over the service (to) maintain safety standards (and) tax compliance,” says Schotter. “I think they went too far with the language requirement – I think the language requirement makes sense, no doubt about it, but Uber has a case… it’s a little dramatic.”

With that being said, he feels it’s not entirely unlikely that regulators in major Canadian cities could turn to something like language proficiency as a way to regulate and control car sharing companies.

But Dr. Sean Wise, an expert on startups and venture capital and a professor of entrepreneurship at Ryerson University says the City of London, like many other cities, is just trying to feel its way in the dark through the unprecedented disruption these so-called sharing economy companies bring.

“We haven’t seen change at this speed, change is usually generational, and this Uber and Airbnb economy – they’re not a flash in a pan it’s a fundamentally different way to earn a living,” he explains.

But when it comes to regulators, heed his warning: “It’s economical evolution (and) I think you can’t put breaks on evolution,” says Wise. “I think they’ll just climb around it, they’ll go to every other country in the EU and then leave the UK and say ‘change your legislature’ and then someone will run on an Uber-only platform – that’s how things change.”