The woman I spoke to last week lives with her husband in Edinburgh, “in the suburbs, but close enough to touristy things and wedding venues”. Their flat is one of nine in a “big subdivided house”, with a communal garden. “I moved here in the expectation that I’d live with eight other families I would know,” she told me. “But suddenly, I didn’t. I was sharing it with a hotel.”

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For well over a year, one of the neighbouring flats was constantly occupied by people who’d booked their stay online: more than 200 in total, many of whom made no end of noise, and came back drunk – and, in one case, started hurling abuse at a neighbour who had apparently not said hello with enough enthusiasm. “It’s a massive thing,” she told me. “You end up always wondering who’s going to be there: people going to a rugby match, or a wedding party, or what?” She then paused, and said something remarkable: “It transforms the way you feel about home.”

Welcome to the perils of the sharing economy, and the part of the online realm – and, indeed, the bricks-and-mortar real world – dominated by Airbnb, the company that says it wants to “create a world where people can belong when they travel by being connected to local cultures and having unique travel experiences”. Look closely, and you see a familiar mixture of feelgood branding, controversial tax affairs, and cat-and-mouse games with authorities across the world. But on the face of it, the basic premise remains fantastically attractive: travel liberated from often arrogant and complacent hotels – and, for people with rooms to spare, a chance to make the cost of living that bit easier to bear.

Between 2016 and 2017, the number of people using Airbnb to stay in places around the UK grew by 81%. But by the company’s own account, 55% of its listings were for entire properties rather than the chi-chi spare rooms of its own corporate myth. In Edinburgh, the figure is reckoned to be much the same – and, according to a report commissioned by Andy Wightman, a Green party member of the Scottish parliament, there is also glaring evidence of how much the business of short-term lets has been colonised by buy-to-let career landlords, whose properties are often run by management companies.

In September 2017, 80 properties in the Scottish capital were listed by the same single “host”, 28 such people or companies had 10 or more properties listed, and seven had more than 20. In London, where the share of housing stock advertised on Airbnb in some central boroughs is put as high as 6%, the same imbalanced picture seems to have been taken to insane extremes: late last year, it was revealed that one Airbnb “host” had brought in £12m in a year from almost 900 different listings.

The trajectory seems to be the same as the one followed by the internet itself: the initial promise of a kind of friendly, decentralised capitalism, followed by a stampede by moneyed interests who see not only the chance to make a killing, but the opportunity to do so behind a faux-authentic veneer: what you might think of as the Ben and Jerry’s manoeuvre, a trick that a lot of the giants of so-called platform capitalism have perfected.

What does all this mean in practice? Most obviously, as short-term letting transfers much-needed housing from the residential sector into the tourist economy, it threatens a new kind of gentrification. In the process, there is evidence that it contributes to rising rent levels, and exacerbates grimly predictable social divisions: across all 72 predominantly black neighbourhoods in New York, for example, 74% of Airbnb hosts are reckoned to be white, although the white population in the same places is put at only 14% (the figure is taken from a recent report part-funded by the American trade union the Hotel Trades Council).

In just about all the big cities where short-letting is now standard practice, perhaps the most pernicious effect so far is the one experienced by my contact in Edinburgh: despite the fact that Airbnb’s branding is built around the word “home”, an erosion of some of that word’s most basic meanings, as people’s surrounding environment starts to feel ever more unpredictable and transient.

In London, there is an annual 90-day limit on how long “entire homes” can be offered for short-term lets. At the end of 2016, Airbnb agreed to apply the same rule to its own listings, and it now proposes something similar in the Scottish capital – a sign, perhaps, that it may not be the cartoon villain some people think. But there are obvious ways round this obstacle: short-let profiteers can simply jump from platform to platform (similar anxieties apply to such services as TripAdvisor, booking.com, Onefinestay and HomeAway), relist rooms and flats on Airbnb with slightly changed addresses, or present whole flats or houses as individual rooms, turning them into so-called “ghost hotels”.

If the key problem is more effective regulation, there may be answers. A modest proposal has been floated by politicians in Scotland, and is now the focus of a campaign by the London Labour MP Karen Buck. As she sees it, enforcement of any legislation relating to short lets would be made a lot easier if the people and companies responsible simply had to register their rooms and flats with local authorities. Other voices have suggested that the platforms involved also ought to pool their resources to pay for an independent, industry-wide monitoring and complaints system. Clearly, it would also be a start if the rest of us at least began to understand that the sharing economy does not spread quite as many benefits as its adherents would like to think, and that one person’s footloose city break can be another’s weekend from hell.

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If you want an example of the kind of approach we need to ditch, a good place to start is a trite speech given two weeks ago by Liz Truss, the chief secretary to the Treasury. “I love living in a country where businesses and individuals can pursue their own dreams and desires with the minimum of interference,” she said, before paying tribute to Airbnb – whose business, she insisted, is a simple matter of “making it easier for people to rent out rooms or to find a cheaper place to stay”. The Buck proposal, she warned, was a classic bit of socialist meddling that would have the dread effect of forcing people “to register with the government” before letting their rooms, though among the cities that are already using a comparable system are Chicago and New Orleans.

Developments are surely leaving her way of thinking behind. The current outbreak of anxiety about how much tech giants and platforms are revolutionising our lives comes down to two basic questions. How do we hang on to such fundamentals as privacy, security, home and community? And can we somehow rejoice in the way that some platforms have pushed back archaic practices while also reining in their own damaging effects – in this case, on the places where we live?

There had better be, because the alternative is to carry on leaving huge power unchecked, and to set out on a very dangerous path indeed. If such warnings still leave fans of the free market unmoved, they might like to think of it as The Road to Serfdom.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist