by Franco Bastida — a Mexican writer and global policy expert based in Berlin. Franco’s work focuses on the intersection of technology, policymaking, and social change, with particular expertise in artificial intelligence, the future of work, and human-platform interactions. This blog is produced as a part of the Reshaping Work Fellowship Programme. The opinions and views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Reshaping Work or organisations that have supported the programme.
In March 2014, 1,000 taxi drivers and unions in Milan protested against Uber, accusing the platform of undermining their livelihoods, arguing unfair competition and demanding it be declared illegal. By that summer, the unrest had taken hold of Europe — from Paris to Berlin to Madrid — with thousands of drivers opposing the platform’s expansion due to its lack of regulation.
Similarly, rising costs and gentrification concerns over Airbnb have gradually pushed neighbors and organic grassroots movements in cities like Barcelona to challenge lobbying and also demand regulation. Both cases symbolize a growing clash between tech innovation and traditional sectors. But how disruptive are these platforms to regulatory frameworks and how have governments responded?
This article discusses the recent empirical findings of the REGULATE project, led by Dr. Eliška Drápalová and Dr. Kai Wegrich. Their research examines the regulatory impact of sectoral platforms in 99 cities and 21 European countries, conceptualizing the regulatory disruptiveness of platforms and the challenges they pose for cities, institutions, and regulatory frameworks.
Understanding Platforms’ Power: How it Shapes Cities
The power of platform companies like Uber and Airbnb lies in their business model and approach to value creation. These platforms establish hyper-local, multi-sided markets that connect supplying and demanding agents directly, using technology to intermediate this exchange and shape consumer behavior.
The transport sector is traditionally highly regulated, requiring licenses, permits, insurance, and driver qualifications. Ride-hailing has redefined these norms by enabling flexible agreements, which allow drivers and passengers to coordinate short-notice or pre-planned rides. In the case of peer-to-peer apartment sharing, Airbnb enables residents to rent out their private property, albeit bypassing traditional regulations for tourism, such as licensing, guarantees and liability insurance in most cases. As Dr. Drápalová notes, both sectors have a public aspect: transport often involves semi-public or public providers, whereas housing intersects private property with public value.
“As children, we were told, ‘Do not take food from strangers. You do not ride with them.’ Parents told us not to do these things, and we relied on specific companies or the people we knew. Platforms expanded collective action, for example, by positioning themselves as guarantors of safety,” Dr. Drápalová explains. “But is it something that we have never seen before? The idea is not so new, but its organization and scale are.”
Both the ride-hailing and apartment-sharing sectors share similarities: they are partly regulated at the municipal level, dominated by large players, and tied to public goods under regulatory oversight. Before platforms became widespread, access to these services was limited by market or individual constraints. By building consumer trust and capitalizing on regulatory gaps, platforms have leveraged network effects to transform everyday services, reshaping how people access, work, and interact with markets — from bike rentals to grocery delivery and logistics.
Defining Disruptiveness: Empirical Findings from Europe
In their empirical research, Drápalová and Wegrich conceptualize disruption as the moment when regulators recognize a mismatch between platforms’ business models and existing laws, prompting a regulatory reassessment. Their research compares ride-hailing and apartment-sharing in 99 cities, using 2019 and 2022 as reference years. “Platforms link disruption to creativity and innovation, claiming the rules do not apply to them,” explains Dr. Drápalová. When this disruption can no longer be ignored, regulators are forced to adapt.
The research categorizes how cities have responded to this disruption into four options:
- Ban: Prohibit the platform
- No regulation: Laissez-faire approach
- Enforcement: Apply existing rules to new actors
- New regulation: Develop new frameworks
Across 198 cases, new regulations were the most common in both sectors, with 104 cases (52.5%), followed by no regulation (21.7%), enforcement (20.2%), and bans (5.5%). Responses varied considerably by each city’s regulatory instruments, capacity to learn, level of digitization or technology literacy. Berlin, for instance, responded slowly, reacting to court rulings with enforcement and then gradually adopting changes. Cities in Eastern and Northern Europe, such as Vilnius and Tallinn, took more agile and radical approaches when creating new frameworks.
By 2022, the landscape shifted: enforcement became the leading response (51%), whereas new regulations and no regulation instances declined. Bans increased slightly (7.2%) compared to the earlier period, as cities continued adapting to platform-driven changes.
Reference Chart 1: Regulatory outcomes at the municipal level (for both Uber and Airbnb)
Source: Drapalová & Wegrich (2024) from Platforms’ regulatory disruptiveness and local regulatory outcomes in Europe. Internet Policy Review, 13(2).
Both the transport (55.5%) and housing sectors (49.4%) developed new regulatory frameworks following platform disruptions. Uber’s more aggressive expansion strategy led to higher regulatory resistance in the form of bans (11.1%), compared to none for Airbnb, which followed a more bottom-up acquisition strategy.
Local contexts, perceptions of service as market-complementary, and stakeholder dialogue likely influenced these differences. In Amsterdam, authorities negotiated closely with Airbnb, allowing operations with regular evaluations where processes were institutionalized to ensure compliance and gradually moving to stricter regulations.
By 2022, enforcement increased to 61.2% for Uber and 40.6% for Airbnb, with bans slightly rising for both (Uber from 11.1 to 12.2% and Airbnb from 0% to 2.08%). Overall, these findings point to a decline in the no regulation approach, alongside growth in new regulatory frameworks and enforcement.
Reference Chart 2: Regulatory outcomes at the municipal level by sector
Source: Drapalová & Wegrich (2024), ibid.
Platform Disruption in Context: Learnings from European Cities
As platform disruption continues to reshape urban landscapes, other world regions can draw valuable lessons from the evolving approaches of European cities. By examining coordination across different levels of governance, gaps in the regulatory framework can be identified. Dr. Drápalová notes that when municipal and national policies diverge, it creates ambiguity and hinders effective implementation. In this sense, Europe is making progress in aligning multi-level regulations, with initiatives like the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act or the Platform Work Directive providing more cohesive frameworks.
“Cities work better when platforms take their responsibility in taxation, data sharing or safety,” Dr. Drápalová said. “This can’t be a David versus Goliath story. Platforms solve problems that cities have. Otherwise, people would not use them. But because platforms also create externalities, they should share part of the regulatory burden and contribute to the process.”
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A warm thank you to our interviewee, Dr. Drápalová, research fellow of the Politics of Digitalization Research Group at the Berlin Social Science Center, for sharing her insights. We encourage you to read the study published in the Internet Policy Review.
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Reshaping Work Fellowship is supported by Zurich Insurance.
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