TechScape: Uber’s easy ride is over

A massive leak of confidential internal documents about Uber has cast new light on the strategies the cab-hailing company took to reach the top of its game. Goodbye "fake it till you make it", hello "break it till you make it" - the rules, the law, and anything else that stands in your way.

From our lead story:

There is an awful lot here. There's political wheeling and dealing, of course: Peter Mandelson helped Uber reach the Russian elite; Emmanuel Macron, then-economy minister, helped with the French. The former EU digital chief helped with the Dutch. Documents also suggest that George Osborne, meanwhile, "was a private supporter of the US company's efforts to grow its business in the UK, just as the company simultaneously positioned itself to avoid future UK taxes."

While it was buddying up with politicians, the company was also building infrastructure to avoid the legal ramifications of its launches - which often came several years before the company would eventually be permitted to operate. A "kill switch", built into its systems, let the company lock out local offices from its corporate network, preventing secrets being seized in police raids.

And there's also the fallout of its aggressive tactics. As protests against Uber raged around the world, the company's own drivers were put in harms' way: one report, during aggressive protests in western Europe, put the number of injured drivers at 18 in a day, with "three relatively serious cases involving taxi violence including one badly damaged car and two beaten-up drivers". The response of co-founder and then-chief executive, Travis Kalanick, is "startlingly frank", write the Guardian's Felicity Lawrence and Jon Henley, and focused on the company's battle with the French government: "'If we have 50,000 riders they won't and can't do anything,' he wrote. 'I think it's worth it. Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.'" Kalanick's spokesperson "questioned the authenticity of some documents", the reporters say, and that Kalanick "never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety" and any suggestion that he was involved in such activity would be completely false.

Uber's response has been to shift as much of the blame as possible on to Kalanick, who left the company under a cloud in 2017. "Five years ago, those mistakes culminated in one of the most infamous reckonings in the history of corporate America. That reckoning led to an enormous amount of public scrutiny, a number of high-profile lawsuits, multiple government investigations, and the termination of several senior executives," the company said in a statement. "It's also exactly why Uber hired a new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, who was tasked with transforming every aspect of how Uber operates."

To call the 2017 removal of Kalanick a reckoning serves to obscure the fact that Uber has never really had to look head-on at the tactics that earned it its place in the world. As tech analyst Benedict Evans put it: "Uber's public, avowed strategy was to launch where the service was [more or less] illegal and bully politicians into approving it, rather than lobbying first, on the theory that lobbying wold [sic] fail unless you'd already shown people the service."