Street Fights and Court Battles: Incumbent mobilization and the timing of regulatory bans against platform entrants

In this paper, we examine how incumbent-led mobilization against Uber’s platform entry in Europe relates to regulatory bans, public attention, and consumer-side uptake. Combining hand-coded data on taxi-sector tactics and frames with first regulatory bans, Uber app downloads, and Google search interest across 22 European countries from 2012 to 2020, we identify a differentiated temporal pattern. Private tactics are strongly associated with first-ban hazard in the short window following mobilization, whereas lawsuits are positively associated over a longer window. The frames incumbents deploy also matter: legitimacy-challenge frames portraying UberPop as incompatible with lawful and fair competition are more consistently associated with bans than compliance-dispute frames focused on tax or labor obligations. At the same time, private tactics and lawsuits coincide with immediate increases in app downloads and Google search interest, indicating an attention spillover from incumbent contestation. Lawsuit-related download elevations display marginally greater persistence than those associated with private tactics, although this difference is not stronger early after entry. Taken together, the findings show that incumbent mobilization in platform markets can be associated with regulatory bans and consumer-side uptake of the entrants they seek to exclude at the same time. The results establish temporal association, although the direction of influence within this process cannot be isolated.