A Legal Analysis of the Platform Economy

this chapter aims at identifying the emerging legal issues stemming from the advent of the sharing-oriented platform economy, in order to categorize the wide array of competing and sometimes conflicting aspects that regulators should be considering when facing these new innovative practices. The chapter first describes how the advent of the platform economy challenges the current legal framework, at both local and global level; then, it addresses the main legal issues related to market regulation; in its second and final part, it analyzes those aspects of the sharing-oriented platform economy that go beyond market regulation, in order to categorize different models of platform economy and their respective positioning with regard to a commons oriented economy.