This makes me sad : Taxi drivers in France are running private-hires most of the time (through radio-taxi, ambulances in rural zones, and trips booked for consulting / financial / lawyer firms over the phone...) They had abandonned the "on the streets" taxi business, unless for tourists they could rip off, and since Uber is making money and driving people back to transportation services they want to steal Uber's success. And they try to make it happen the worst way you could think of
Paris taxis are pretty bad in my experience. Try getting one to drive you to the airport at 4am or Sunday - you have to order one a day ahead. Fortunately folks at the Paris office always had a friend taxi driver who would help, but this contradicts Taxi contract to begin with - I want to go from where I am to X now. That feat is difficult in Paris.
I'm trying to understand the issue here -- UberPop drivers were picking up folks via hail, and not the app? Is that the issue here/in general in France?
You need to be a registered driver to pick up folks for money in France. So Uber or Uber X are lawful (professional drivers => ok), but Uber Pop is not.
As for picking people via hail, IIRC you still need to be a taxi. For private drivers (like Uber X), one has to order before. There was a lot of debate on this about a year ago already.
The first constraint exists in other countries it seems to me, and there is a reasonable case of unfair competition as professional drivers have extra requirements and costs vs. an Uber Pop driver. The second one on hail looks to me like taxi drivers lobbying to protect their turf, and shouldn't exists. But right now all the hoopla is on Uber Pop.
In any case the taxi situation has been a known mess in Paris for a long time. It can't last forever. The taxi rejected any evolution so far, while politics were not eager to force changes against a very noisy and well organized profession. The result is that we have roughly the same number of taxis as in 1930, with 3 times the population. Not enough taxis at peak time, and poor service is the result. It will eventually change, and it will be messy. Typical...
UberPop is not allowed in France because the drivers don't have a license to do taxi-like activities. In France, you need a license delivered by the state or be a so called "VTC" (vehicle with chauffeur), which is somewhat like a taxi except that VTCs cannot pick up clients without getting a reservation from a customer.
The licenses taxis pay are, in some cases, extremely expensive (about 250k euros in Paris), which is why taxis are opposed to all kinds of competition (Uber and UberPop included).
To provide a bit more context: the number of licenses is very limited. When sold by the state the license is cheap, but then it can be resold privately and then the price will skyrocket as there is a too limited offer.
This creates lots of nastiness. Private taxis typically get their license on the private market, it's a significant investment for them and they count on being able to resell it when they retire.
Big companies can lobby to get a good share of the (very limited number of) new licenses, when any.
It's been clear that this limited number of licenses should go. But the question is how to deal with it. The reasonable approach would have been a planned and regular increase, leading to a gradual depreciation of the market price of the license that all could have taken into account. But the taxis always opposed this (with good lobbying from big taxi companies, who of course enjoy the quasi monopoly situation and are good at lobbying politics and playing their drivers). And the state has no money to pull the licenses out, compensate for loss and get rid of the scheme quickly. So the taxi system hasn't changed much so far.
Now we're in the state where new entrants are coming, reducing the taxi monopoly bit by bit with taxis screaming all the way through. That will (hopefully) force changes.
