Uber wins dismissal of lawsuit by Connecticut taxi companies
Uber Technologies Inc on Thursday won the dismissal of a racketeering lawsuit by 15 Connecticut taxi and limousine companies seeking to stop the ride-sharing company from doing business in the state.
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015, 15 Connecticut taxi and limousine companies tried a novel line of attack: framing Uber's market entry as a racketeering conspiracy under federal RICO statutes rather than a routine licensing dispute. The court's dismissal ends that theory before it could become a template.
The win sits early in a long legal arc for Uber: incumbents' entry-blocking suits failed here, but the company later lost its own challenge to New York City's vehicle-cap law and spent years defending against rival-driven antitrust claims, including Sidecar's suit over anti-competitive practices that a judge initially dismissed.
First-order effects
- Uber keeps operating in Connecticut without the threat of an injunction from these 15 taxi and limousine plaintiffs, whose RICO theory is now dead at the dismissal stage.
Second-order effects
- With courtroom entry-blocking off the table, taxi incumbents' leverage shifts toward regulators and legislatures — the path New York took years later when its Supreme Court upheld a cap on ride-hail vehicle numbers against Uber's own lawsuit.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across this corpus points to litigation asymmetry: incumbent suits against Uber's entry largely fail, while claims about how Uber competes — like the antitrust case a federal judge later allowed to proceed over Sidecar's collapse — prove harder to shake, pushing the real fight from market access to competitive conduct.
The trend: Ride-hailing's legal battles migrated from whether Uber may operate at all — where courts sided with the platform — to how it competes and operates, where outcomes have run both ways.