France - market entry - legitimate business of a virtual taxi operator

Project Outline Our Company developed a mobile application that enables passengers to order a taxi via their smartphone. Individual taxi drivers enrolled in our program pay us for each successful facilitated order. The fundamental principle of our service is to mediate between 2 user groups - passengers and drivers. We can be thus viewed as a virtual taxi operator. We have a separate contract (Terms of Service) with each of the user groups and we are not a contractual party to the agreement between the driver and the passenger on the ride itself. At present we are preparing ourselves for entering the local market in your country. For this reason we are performing business and legal analyses with an aim to identify in advance the barriers of entry. Questions 1. Do we need any license to operate our service? e.g. that of a taxi dispatching/operator? What is the local definition of a taxi dispatching/operator? Is the definition set on state or municipality level? 2. Do we need a local subject (company) to run our operations in your country? If so, for what purposes? e.g. income taxes/licenses/other? Or could such electronic service be legally operated from outside of your country? 3. Is there a local legal regulation that would require us to perform verification procedures on the validity of the individual driver's licences? 4. Are there any legal precedents relating to or open legal actions against our local competition? If so, who were those suing our local competition - e.g. the municipality or local taxi competitors? What merits were those legal actions based upon? 5. What are the top 3 local competitors (brands facilitating ordering taxies via mobile applications) on the local market? Established competitors In order to find out more on our business please consider becoming familiar with our major competitors: MyTaxi: [login to view URL] Hailo: [login to view URL] Output We expect a short legal review bringing aswers to our questions with relevant descriptions and explainations from the local legal perspective. This document will serve for our internal purposes - mainly for the consideration of our lawyers. Please feel free to ask any additional questions. Desired Skills Contract Law, Corporate Law, Legal Consulting, Legal Research