Uber’s arrival in Australia was not the glossy tale of disruptive innovation so often celebrated in Silicon Valley lore.
According to the detailed findings of the Supreme Court of Victoria, the company’s expansion strategy was built on calculated law-breaking, industrial espionage, and a corporate playbook designed to bulldoze competitors rather than out-innovate them.
For anyone studying competitive strategy, the judgment reads like a warning: scale achieved through unlawful conduct carries a cost vastly greater than any early-market advantage.
The facts are stark.
When Uber launched its peer-to-peer ridesharing product, UberX, in Australian cities from 2014, ridesharing was illegal.
State transport laws required commercial passenger vehicles to be licensed and drivers to be accredited—conditions the UberX model knowingly ignored.
The court heard that thousands of UberX trips were completed in breach of legislation and that Uber entities knew the conduct was unlawful, enabled it, and were complicit in offences committed by their drivers.
This wasn’t regulatory oversight; it was a strategy. Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick, famously described the company’s approach as “regulatory arbitrage”—entering markets before lawmakers could catch up, using early scale to pressure governments into rewriting laws to match Uber’s business model.
The Victorian judgment reveals how deliberately and aggressively that strategy was executed in Australia.
Uber deployed staff, money, and technical infrastructure across multiple entities in its corporate group, each assuming different roles to ensure the seamless daily operation of an unlawful service while attempting to evade detection. The court noted that the misconduct was “pervasive and systemic”, not incidental.
Equally troubling was the company’s internal culture. Evidence showed that Uber executives viewed local competitors—notably Taxi Apps, the creator of the GoCatch taxi-booking app—as obstacles to be “crushed” before they secured enough users to resist Uber’s late arrival in the taxi-booking space.
Network effects mattered: whichever platform secured riders and drivers first would dominate. According to the court, Uber’s head start in the illegal market created an entrenched advantage once ridesharing was later legalised.
That advantage was amplified by behaviour crossing the line from aggressive to unconscionable.
In 2013, Uber operatives obtained GoCatch’s confidential driver list through a proxy—effectively an act of industrial espionage.
The court found Uber Australia had breached an equitable obligation of confidence by using information it knew had been procured surreptitiously to recruit GoCatch drivers.
In the judge’s words, the conduct was “wrong and unconscionable”, falling well below commercially acceptable standards.
The case ultimately failed on the strict legal test for conspiracy, but the narrative emerging from the evidence is damning.
Uber did not simply “move fast and break things”—it built market share on deliberate law-breaking, exploited regulatory gaps, used shell-like corporate entities to disperse responsibility, and harvested competitor information to accelerate its dominance.
This saga demonstrates that competitive success is not measured only by market share or valuation. It is equally judged by the means used to achieve them—and whether those means contribute to, or undermine, the integrity of the markets in which businesses operate.
