New York Can Fight Airbnb and Uber, But the Share Economy Is Here to Stay | Wired Business | Wired.com: New York is a city built on bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are inherently resistant to change, especially when a new technology comes along to undermine the assumptions on which those bureaucracies were built. And in a way that’s by design. The mechanization of the economy and the mechanization of government have occurred in parallel, often in the form of agencies meant to check industries’ more flagrant violations of the social contract. In a sense, those bureaucracies’ express mission is to hinder progress.
Still, renting out your room when you’re not home or your car when you’re not driving it hardly feels flagrant. If people and the politicians they elect feel the same way, these bureaucratic roadblocks to the sharing economy’s rise will also turn out to be very temporary. Whether or not Airbnb, RelayRides or Uber turn out to be the companies that define the future of sharing, the idea of using technology to leverage any resource’s excess idle capacity seems too sensible—and popular—to fail.