The ‘sharing economy’ which has been epitomized with the ride-sharing company Uber isn’t going away, and requires government regulations, say the authors of a Mowat Centre report released Tuesday.

“To date, the reaction from governments has felt like a frantic game of ‘whack-a-mole’ — struggling to contain these new enterprises while even more pop up,” writes co-authors Sunil Johal and Noah Zon of the Mowat Centre, in their report ‘Policymaking for the Sharing Economy: Beyond Whack-A-Mole.’ “This is unproductive.”

It is a message that was voiced last month by insurance mandarins who had gathered in Toronto, Ont. for a discussion panel on the new technologies and companies like Uber, Google and telematics that are changing how insurance works.

“You want to be enabling new technologies, not discouraging them,” said Alister Campbell, CEO of The Guarantee Company of North America.

“If we keep looking at every disruption as being problematic, we’ll always be on the back foot,” said Greg Somerville, the president and CEO at Aviva Canada.

“The technology will always evolve,” said Lambert Morvan, the COO at Northbridge Insurance, “it is the concept we need to embrace.”

Companies like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit, are a part of what is known as the sharing economy and are not going away, so governments must figure out ways to regulate them, state Johal and Zon.

And it needs to happen now, before these firms of the new sharing economy become set in their ways.

The report urges policymakers to recognize that they must step up to protect the public interest, while also ensuring that they don’t destroy innovation.

“You have a Wild West situation where people are engaging in transactions and the details haven’t been thought out,” Johal told the Toronto Star. “The scale and the speed at which these companies can grow is why in our view they are a new, emerging business model that governments can’t turn away from.” (continued.)
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People making cash by renting an apartment or doing odd jobs is nothing new, but today – according to the report – the difference is that those activities are “at a scale that blurs the boundaries of the personal and the commercial and threatens to disrupt existing markets and regulatory models.”

Uber, which has a valuation estimated at $40 billion (US), insists it’s merely a technology company that helps riders find drivers, and is therefore not subject to traditional taxi licensing rules.