This isn't "sharing economy" anymore. The term was coined for what AirBnB and Uber may have originally been: lower transaction costs to capture the value of spa

This isn't "sharing economy" anymore. The term was coined for what AirBnB and Uber may have originally been: lower transaction costs to capture the value of space/car seats that would otherwise go unused. That idea got a warm welcome because it's almost universally good; Not just for those buying and selling, but producing positive externalities along the way: more car sharing means less traffic and lower emissions etc. But what these businesses have turned into are marketplaces for exactly what they were trying to replace, i. e. Taxis and hotels. The difference that remains is just a different allocation along several zero-sum trade-offs. Uber changed the bargain for taxi rides, essentially taking money from the top and bottom of society, and giving it to the middle. The 1% are subsidising your taxi rides with their investments, and the pool of drivers is fast approaching to be the same people who would usually drive taxis. Only now their pay is 25% lower, and they no longer have health insurance and other benefits. With AirBnB, the deal they offer is also just a different trade-off. In this case, the customers themselves also bear some of the downsides of the cheap price, although they may not notice. If you always wanted to safe 50 cents/night on your hotel bill because you thought that smoke alarms or secondary emergency exits are luxuries, AirBnB is your friend. The other losers are, unfortunately, almost exclusively people who aren't part of these transactions: the neighbours who get to experience the downsides of having budget-conscious traveler having the time of their lives next door. Or those who can't find affordable homes because parts of the market have been diverted to tourism (where a hotel is usually significantly more space-effective than apartments). In both cases, these companies are making decisions that were traditionally reserved for the political sphere. Politics is the process of balancing competing interests, with mechanisms to reach equitable outcomes in a process that sometimes fails to, but at least aspires to, being fair and transparent. It's good to see politicians reasserting their power with all the legitimacy the process to elect them brings vis-a-vis these companies trying to ride the wave of cynicism to a big payday. Because all the allure of AirBnB's and Uber's PR strategy rests on this libertarian fairytale of "regulatory strangulation", i. e. the phenomenon that it's en vogue to decry some unknown "regulations", without ever naming any specific safety rules that are supposedly unnecessary. Or to ridicule some specific rule, but without investing the minimum of time to see why people, after reviewing all the information available, may have come up with them. There may certainly be some regulations that should be eased. In fact, it's almost a given that for any rule or law, you can make a credible case to change it in either direction: if it takes 100,000 smoke detectors to save one life per year, and if they cost $20 each per year, putting them into every room only makes sense if you value a life at more than $2,000,000. And you can argue about the 2 million, or the price (will they get cheaper or more expensive if we require them?), or the number of lives saved. But you can't credibly say "OMG the government is stoopid". And before people say they want these decisions to be made by the people involved, i. e. for AirBnB to have "has smoke detectors" on their listing: it is almost always cheaper to centralise such decision making. It'd be a waste of time if every guest had to check the smoke detectors' batteries individually, and certify that they actually do detect smoke, and that their batteries do not spontaneously start burning themselves every now and then etc.