More confirmation of Uber’s small economic footprint comes from Plouffe’s brag, in a recent article, that Uber drivers earned $3.5 billion in the first 10 months of 2015. That is a lot of earnings, yet it represents about 0.06 percent of all private-sector compensation.

Given that Uber is the juggernaut of the gig economy, it should not be surprising that the entire gig economy is not all that large. Nor has it grown much in recent decades. According to the Census Bureau, the revenues brought in by all self-employed businesses accounted for, on average, a bit more than 3 percent of all American revenues from 1997 to 2013. In fact, employee-less businesses’ lowest share was in 2012 and 2013, even though there were 23 million such establishments in 2013. It is telling that the Census says that “due to their small economic impact, these firms are excluded from most other Census Bureau business statistics.”

Employment data also contradicts the notion that the U.S. is becoming a nation of freelancers. A recent analysis I did for the Economic Policy Institute shows that the self-employed (those with no paid employees working for them) comprised only 7 to 8 percent of total employment in 2014. What’s more, self-employment was stable in the 20 years before then. Uber is frequently in the news, and digital-freelancing platforms garner a lot of attention, but evidence of an exploding gig economy is, as they say, showing up everywhere but the data.

However, all this should not be taken to mean that Uber’s rise doesn’t raise important policy questions. The company may be small relative to the economy, but it is still a sizable company. Moreover, the controversies surrounding Uber’s practices may lead to legal changes that would affect workers in a number of other sectors.

The most prominent legal and legislative question—one that has major implications for workers in industries as varied as construction and trucking—is whether Uber drivers are being misclassified when Uber considers them independent contractors instead of actual employees. Independent contractors lack important protections, such as unemployment insurance and compensation for on-the-job injuries, that are granted to workers classified as employees. They also must pay both the employer’s and the employee’s portions of the Social-Security payroll tax. This classification also has implications for collective bargaining (as independent contractors are not covered by the legal framework enabling it) and for the overall collection of tax revenues (as the failure to report income is very common among independent contractors).

Some argue that work through digital platforms is so qualitatively different that new legal categories are required to govern employment relations. This is reminiscent of Amazon’s argument in the 1990s that online orders shouldn’t be subject to sales tax because they are qualitatively different from brick-and-mortar purchases—an argument that rings even more hollow now than then. The Harvard law professor Ben Sachs has persuasively argued that Uber should be considered an employer and that “workers can choose when and how much to work, and can even work without immediate supervision, and still be employees.” The challenge, then, is to preserve the plainly evident value of Uber’s services while having the company comply with rules that provide adequate consumer, tax, and worker protections.