Carolina Journal’s Barry Smith reports on a regulatory fight that’s brewing over new, technology-based competition for rides and rooms. Taxi drivers, for example, face regulatory hoops. The new competitors don’t face all the same rules and costs. Predictably, some are calling  for the new services to be brought into the regulatory scheme.

Frustrated by their lack of authority to police upstart businesses in the “sharing economy” — a marketplace relying on direct negotiations between providers and consumers — some North Carolina municipalities are asking the General Assembly for permission to regulate businesses such as Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.

Uber and Lyft are smart phone app-based ride-sharing services that have begun operating in a handful of North Carolina cities. Airbnb is an online service that allows people to rent a room, apartment, or house from the owner, bypassing real estate brokers or apartment management companies.

A Charlotte municipal official as well as competitors of sharing economy businesses approached the General Assembly’s Revenue Laws Study Committee in November, asking lawmakers to authorize more regulations on these businesses. The committee meets when the General Assembly is out of session to recommend changes in the state’s tax code.

Rather than ensnaring more people and businesses, a more reasoned approach is to use this as an opportunity for a thorough review of the current regulations. In doing so, we can take the opportunity to pare them back so that consumers enjoy many choices that competition brings, and people who want to earn cash can do so.

Katherine Parsons of Wake County, a driver for Lyft and an Airbnb host, said the two ventures help her earn a few dollars to supplement her family’s income.

“I’m a part-time driver; I might drive two hours a week,” Parsons said. “If you overlegislate this, if you make it difficult for me to do this kind of thing, if you make it expensive … I just won’t do it.”

Said David Hippensteel, an Uber driver, state employee, and U.S. Navy veteran, “If you want to regulate me, you need to regulate family and friends as well. What Uber and Lyft does is no different than if I had 50 friends that at any given time would call me up and say, ‘Hey, can I get a ride someplace. And at the end of that ride, they’d say, hey, here’s $10 or $15 for gas.’”

Exactly.