City Mayors Worldwide Forge Alliance in Response to Airbnb, Uber

Uber and Airbnb have set their sights on global expansion. They’re about to face a global response. Mayors from New York to Paris to Seoul think they’ve found the trick to coping with so-called “sharing economy” apps -- working together. Ten markets are jointly preparing a unified rule book in a bid to leverage their combined size to promote clearer ground rules.

These companies have been used to dealing with regulators, but they’ve done so mostly on a city-by-city basis. That’s about to change: Representatives for cities that also includes Athens, Barcelona and Toronto, have started their first concerted effort to produce a common framework. While there’s no white paper or policy drawn up yet, multiple city representatives met for the first time last month in Amsterdam to discuss. Paris is calling for a first publication by October.