Last week, we discussed the impact of services such as Uber or Airbnb. More broadly, no sectors is immune to major overhauls. Today, we’ll have a look at the impact of Disruptors.

Nested in Paris’ Le Marais neighborhood, a clever incubator/think-thank called TheFamily, made its mission to chronicle the digital transformation of our society. Largely inspired by the iconic Ycombinator incubator, TheFamily funds and provides all sorts of services to a hundred plus startups. But it also wants to rattle the establishment with an activist posture. Paraphrasing the “Barbarians at the Gate” book title, the incubator hosts a conference series titled Les Barbares Attaquent (Barbarians On The Attack) that examines all the sectors to be impacted by the digital tidal wave.

The latest event (#18) featured the book industry. Prior to that, human resources, retail, luxury, housing & construction, health, transportation, education, garment industry, consulting, insurance, finance and other sectors were dissected by TheFamily partners and guest speakers. Each time with a larger attendance.

One of the founders, Nicolas Colin, recently made headlines when his blog post (fr) denounced the notoriously archaic parisian taxi lobby (see previous Monday Note), triggering a lawsuit from Nicolas Rousselet, the owner of the main French taxi company G7. (Nicolas is the son of André Rousselet, himself one of former president François Mitterrand’s favorite oligarchs, anointed TV mogul in the late Eighties). By suing the blogger, Rousselet Jr. wanted to shut down any criticism of his company’s unrelenting conservatism. In fact, he completely underestimated the reaction of the French digital multitude that rallied en masse to support the blogger (and the media La Tribune, that republished the infamous post.)

This little Gallic tale illustrates the split between the old and the new economy. It could have happened in Brussels, Berlin or San Francisco where lobbies furiously oppose the rise of Disruptors that threaten transportation or short-term rental housing — among other things.

Before we go further, let’s look at the engine of the Disruptors’ phenomenal growth. It can be summed up to one phrase: unprecedented access to capital.

When it comes to technology, Uber or Airbnb are not rocket science. The platform and the algorithm needed to efficiently match supply & demand have been indeed brilliantly implemented, but there is no need beyond off-the-shelf technologies to set up the whole thing. By contrast, when Google started in 1998, it did stretch the limits of the technology of the day (networking and computing power); as for Facebook, despite the relative crudeness of the original concept, it had to deal very early with scalability issues. Actually on its very first day, Mark Zuckerberg’s hottest girl matching system (how nice) crashed Harvard’s network. No such headache for Uber or Airbnb who rely on proven technologies: cellular network, mapping, databases, LAMP-based softwares. As shown in the following three graphs, funding has been equally abundant for these areas:

Not only have investors poured big money in Uber and Airbnb but they did so extremely fast, boosting the valuation of these two companies to staggering levels. Since there is very little technology involved, where did the money go? Mostly to market share acquisitions, the only way to leave the competition in the dust for good. Take Airbnb: in just one year, its number of listed spaces grew more than doubled to 500,000 listings in 33,000 cities and 192 countries. Its $10bn valuation puts it head-to-head with the giant group Accor that operates 3500 brick-and-mortar hotels and 450,000 rooms.

In these new models, the American venture capital ecosystem is acting as a weapon of mass domination. When Uber collects more than $300 million in VC money to expand in 100 cities worldwide, its London-based competitor HailO got “only” $77m and when it comes to the French LeCab, it only raised €11m ($15m). It shows how anemic the French system is when it comes to funding its startups; instead of patting the registered cabs sector in the back with demagogic promises, the successive digital economy ministers would have been better advised to act decisively to stimulate access to capital.

Still, the European way of resisting these new models won’t last for long. To be sure, in Brussels, the ill-named “ministry of mobility” decided to simply forbid Uber-like system; in France, the resistance is more messy when hundreds of yelling taxi divers blocked main streets and airport accesses. But grass-root movements are likely to morph into a more anglo-saxon-like lobbying, with highly paid professional hired to defend special interests.

Consider this: between 1998 and 2013, the amount spent in Washington DC alone by various lobbies has grown x16 in constant dollars to a staggering $3.23bn. Today, tech firms are the fourth contributor after pharmaceuticals, insurance and oil & gas: when a big pharma spend $1.00 to influence lawmakers, tech companies now spend $0.63 and the gap is closing.

Why am I mentioning this? It’s because the capital raised by Disruptors will inevitably find its way to effective lobbyism in Brussels (at the European Commission), and eventually in Paris or Berlin.

Disruptors’ lobbyists will argue that new urban transportations system and peer-to-peer housing rental do more good than harm in the community. And for the most part, they might be right. Sharing cars in congested cities via system such as RelayRides definitely makes sense from a environment standpoint when any individual car stays idle 95% of the time. A survey conducted by UC Berkeley (pdf here) on a 6,000 San Francisco residents participating on car-sharing system revealed a drop of 50% in the personal car ownership (the auto industry might not like it, but our lungs will.)

On the economic side, there is no shortage or arguments either. Terminating the paid-for license system (the so-called Medallion) would free €3 billion in Paris, and $10 billion in New York, sums now immobilized and promised to an inexorable deflation. In times of raising inequality, maybe it is not such a bad idea to let people make extra money by renting their apartment or their car — with limitations, of course. To put some figures on the idea: an Airbnb host in San Francisco is making $9,300 per year on average by renting his/er property 58 nights. As for those who makes their personal car available for sharing though RelayRides, they make on average $250 a month.

As for the hotel industry, evidence shows Airbnb’s growth to have very little impact. According to the Boston University School of Management, in the state of Texas, a growth of 1% in Airbnb supply translated into only a 0,05% decrease in the revenue of 4,000 hotels surveyed, while a single percentage point of increase in the supply of regular hotels rooms translated into a 0.29% decrease — 20 times more — in Texas hotel revenues. Of course, cheap hotels are more impacted than the local Hyatt.

Between consumers who are voting with their smartphones, enjoying Uber or Airbnb, and the fact that Disruptors are undoubtedly beneficial to the community, regulators and lawmakers will have hard time defending the status quo.

In fact, they are left with two levers: making sure that the consumer is properly protected form any abuse (that’s already the case, basically) and dealing smartly with the tax issue. The digital economy has a long track-record of linking success to hubris — in practical terms, it means a strong disregard for local tax systems. Here in Europe, the first thing Uber and Airbnb did was setting most of their operations in tax-friendly places such as Luxembourg or Ireland — like Apple or Google before them. On the long run, that’s obviously a mistake as politicians will seize on the opportunity to further single out these new models. In fact, Disruptors would be well-advised to play by the rules in order to insure the sustainability of their services.

— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com