Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb can't avoid regulation forever. They've just been lucky so far. Eventually there will be a high profile incident—someone important will get raped or murdered. The political response will be 1000x what their lobbyists can handle.
It is inevitable. The reality is that this is how a lot of regulation starts. It doesn't always come from an anticompetitive place. We just forget that we actually asked for the regulation. Once we have, it's nice to always be able to blame the government or some regulator when something goes wrong. And then someone else can come in and "disrupt" the market by using a loophole of pretending like the regulation doesn't apply to them, when it's clearly intended to.
It is inevitable. The reality is that this is how a lot of regulation starts. It doesn't always come from an anticompetitive place. We just forget that we actually asked for the regulation. Once we have, it's nice to always be able to blame the government or some regulator when something goes wrong. And then someone else can come in and "disrupt" the market by using a loophole of pretending like the regulation doesn't apply to them, when it's clearly intended to.