“For Martin Varsavsky, founder of Fon, legal issues interfere with the sharing economy in moments when you ‘want to share [things] that we realized are not really yours exactly the way you thought.’ For instance, he illustrates, you can’t really share the digital music that you own, because of laws and regulations.
And sometimes, collaborative consumption companies launch before the regulation catch up. One example is the hotel lobby, which is now pushing governments to take action against Airbnb, a service that allows people to rent out their rooms on an individual basis, as they claim Airbnb is unfair competition to them.
Where Varsasky is idealistic, Yiannopoulos may be a bit idiosyncratic, and both arguments might break down in the Arab world. On the one hand, startups less likely to be able to lobby their governments for policy changes that will directly enable collaborative consumption, if governments cannot be lobbied for broader freedoms.
Startups in the Arab world also often don’t stand a chance of being propped up until they fail. They won’t be able to survive from government handouts or an abundance of VC capital; most startups have to bootstrap and struggle to find good VC funding.”
Published with the author’s permission, Aline Mayard, WAMDA.
We do believe that there is a long battle between the sharing economy and the legality problems in the Arab world, which is still at the beginning.
But it may seem sharing economy is gaining momentum, because of the nature of the sharing culture in the Arab world, the situation experienced here where the Arab governments are currently not able to provide all the needs for their citizens in appropriate prices in an era characterized by high cost of living, increasing personal consumption, and high environmental problems.
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