The title seems totally unsupported by the article to me. A less misleading one might be "The 'sharing economy' has evolved into a collection of large, unregulated, rental businesses"
The sharing economy was always fron day 1 about rentals. That's the central premise.
What's deviating from the original concept is that barriers to entry are restricting supply to the point that providing a service becomes too profitable and actually pays off to provide it full time.
Consider Uber. The principle behind ride sharing is quite simple: if you're already driving somewhere you can help someone out by sharing your ride with someone who wants to go where you're going. Cars are already clogging the roads while operating at 1/5 of their capacity. So, why not give someone a ride and be rewarded for your efford? Except that regulation bars individuals from doing just thay, and thus so-called rideshare companies are actually taxi companies.
Sure - I still think the title is misleading. "Was always a scam" implies that everyone in the sharing economy has been lying for decades in order to make money. I don't see any evidence presented in the article that supports that implication.
And when looking at it through a reasonable lens as you do in your comment, I also don't understand the urge to treat it as though "sharing economy" companies are somehow evil or deceptive. They're just responding to market conditions in a way that (at least in the short term) produces value for both drivers and riders. There are other arguments you can make about whether this is bad in the long term due to e.g. dynamics around regulation, but that's an argument about how things will play out in the future, not about past or current bad faith on the part of Uber or AirBnb.
>The sharing economy was always fron day 1 about rentals. That's the central premise.
If I may, the central premise is about being middle-man in a (renting) transaction, shaving off a fee from it for the service of establishing a contact between the two parties and - optionally - provide ancillary services (again at a cost for either party involved in the transaction).
You've just defined a business transaction. Being paid for providing a service is not the central premise, and completely misses the whole point.
The central premise of sharing economy is that people have access to resources, whether they are goods or services, that are underused or even wasted, resulting in an unnecessarily high level of economic inefficiency. Thus if a system is set to encourage those who have the resources to make them available to potential clients for a fee then everyone involved wins. A key concept is to set a centealized service which handles the hard part of a business such as transactions, business models, and disputes.
Well, that is exactly what the "businesses" revolving around it are doing.
Offering in your words a "centralized service which handles the hard part of a business such as transactions, business models, and disputes" cutting a fee from the value of the transaction.
The point of disagreement between our opinions only revolves around that service(s) being the "hard part" of the business and about the actual amount of the fees involved for these services.
Anyway a line needs to be drawn between an actual "sharing car" approach, as an example we have here blablacar where someone already has to go from A to B and offers a ride to recover some costs and something like Uber and Lyft, here the driver is going from A to B only because the customer(s) needs to go from A to B.
What's deviating from the original concept is that barriers to entry are restricting supply to the point that providing a service becomes too profitable and actually pays off to provide it full time.
Consider Uber. The principle behind ride sharing is quite simple: if you're already driving somewhere you can help someone out by sharing your ride with someone who wants to go where you're going. Cars are already clogging the roads while operating at 1/5 of their capacity. So, why not give someone a ride and be rewarded for your efford? Except that regulation bars individuals from doing just thay, and thus so-called rideshare companies are actually taxi companies.