The sharing ecoonomy

In 2006, serial entrepreneur and investor Martín Varsavsky – inspired by a conviction that he could cloak the world in free Wi-Fi by encouraging people to share their home connections – founded Fon in Madrid. The company is now the largest Wi-Fi network in the world, with almost 12m hot spots in more than 100 countries.

"My general thinking at the time was that we live in a world in which benefits are only accrued through economic growth and the endless consumption of resources, and that there have to be other ways that are of more benefit to people," he says. "Why should everyone have their own car when most of the time they are not using them? Think of a marina full of boats. How frequently do those boats go out?"

Today, it has been argued that the sharing economy – which is perhaps best defined as a way of sweating underutilised assets, by building communities around them and turning consumers into providers – has the potential to reboot businesses across most economic categories. Indeed, Forbes magazine recently estimated that total revenues for the sector could top $3.5bn this year, with growth exceeding 25%. However, when setting up Fon, Varsavsky became convinced that people needed a nudge or financial incentive before they'd happily share their assets.

"In the case of Wi-Fi we came up with the concept that if you share a little Wi-Fi at home, you can roam the world for free," he says. "That's a small loss and a huge gain. And now [years later] we see that in all those situations where you have a small loss and a big gain, the sharing economy makes sense."

Yet while it makes sense, at least intellectually, it's when you start to examine the legalities around the ownership of assets that the sharing economy starts to run into trouble, argues the 53-year-old, who was born in Buenos Aires. It turns out ownership is not as clear cut as many of us might expect. "You think something is yours to share until somebody says, 'Hey! It's not really yours at all,'" says Varsavsky, citing the terms and conditions around "owning" Wi-Fi and the copyright of books and music as examples.

The fast-growing peer-to-peer (P2P) holiday lodgings market is another case in point. There are claims that its success is gnawing away at the incumbent hotel sector's profit margins and even starting to have an impact on property prices. The hotel industry has begun to fight back, primarily, it seems, through behind the scenes lobbying of regulators and politicians.

On 20 May, New York officials ruled that a man who rented out part of his NYC apartment for three days on Airbnb – the sharing economy's most high-profile success story to date – should pay $2,400 for violating the city's illegal hotel law. Airbnb says it is committed to fighting the ruling. The P2P holiday rentals marketplace is hitting roadblocks in Europe, too: the authorities in Amsterdam and Berlin, for example, are reportedly considering laws that will make it tougher for companies such as Airbnb and its European rivals HouseTrip, Wimdu and 9flats to operate.