[dragonwriter]

> They're different from their traditional competitors in that they increase the utilization of one's pre-owned assets.

That's actually not a difference from their traditional competitors, in that (to the extent that the uses weren't actually illegal at the time) agent-intermediated rentals for already-owned assets weren't new things when these apps started doing it, and also because these apps aren't specific to "pre-owned" assets, and in fact drive asset purchases dedicated to rental through the apps. (And, in any case, rental-through-an-agent doesn't become "sharing" just because you owned the property you chose to rent out before you decided to rent it out.)

[aianus]

Normal people didn't rent out their bedrooms overnight before AirBnB came around and now they do. Normal people also didn't drive strangers around for money in their own cars before Lyft and UberX came along and now they do.

You can't say there's nothing new there.

[dragonwriter]

> Normal people didn't rent out their bedrooms overnight before AirBnB came around and now they do. Normal people also didn't drive strangers around for money in their own cars before Lyft and UberX came along and now they do.

People clearly did. I'm not sure what definition of "normal" you are trying to use here, but it seems likely circular...

> You can't say there's nothing new there.

Nor did I say that there's nothing new there. What I did say is that it has nothing to do with "sharing", each is just a new convenient web/mobile app for fairly normal agent-intermediated rentals (often with little attention to the legalities of the specific industry -- which in several cases of so-called 'sharing economy' companies is the main innovation offered over existing online agent-intermediated rental systems in otherwise similar markets.)