We can no longer bury our heads in the sand about the sharing economy.

London is the latest city to launch a broadside against car ride provider Uber – but unlike other places which have done so aggressively, the British capital is trying more subtle ways to curb its growth, including compulsory language tests.

There have been protests against Uber in Italy, Brussels, France, Brazil and the US, almost all organised by ‘official’ taxis and their unions. Taxi drivers are howling at suddenly being faced by the latest disruptive technology which has threatened their livelihood.

The Uber mobile app allows consumers with smartphones to ask for a ride, from drivers who use their own private cars. Since it was launched in 2009 with just $200,000 in seed capital, the service has grown incredibly fast – it is worth an estimated $62.5 billion – and is already available in 507 cities in 66 countries.

Uber, and its many mimics, is part of the so-called sharing economy that included other apps like AirBnB, which has also raised howls from the accommodation industry who feel it is unfair competition. They are part of a brave new world, a paradigm shift that the traditional world simply refuses to accept, preferring to dig its head into the sand in the hope it will just go away.

Here’s the bad news: it won’t.

Here’s the good news:  consumers are benefitting, resources – whether cars, rooms or lawn-mowers – will be used more efficiently, and the sectors will be far better regulated than taxis and bed-and-breakfasts ever were.

Regulation was governments’ heavy-handed but at the time unavoidable way to protect its citizens. With time, the list of rules grew but the enforcement resources did not. Customers lost faith in the regulators’ ability – let alone determination – to stamp out abuse.

This is why it was naïve to see Uber and AirBnB as merely ways to undercut legal operators, or to rake in money without declaring it.

Whatever they started out as, Uber and AirBnB work because they had something that regulators did not: thousands and thousands of enforcers. Their business model was based on trust, the very same trust that consumers had lost in their governments and regulators. And that trust came from empowering its users to praise and criticise. Whether through an app or through social media, rating a ride or a room or a restaurant was easy, instant and effective.

No matter how assiduously opponents try to portray its sharing economy competitors as unsafe and unregulated, the reality is that these business models rely on good rankings, and since comments and feedback are so visible and ubiquitous, there is far less chance of systematic abuse. Of course, there will always be the rogue element but isolating them is no longer down to whether there are enough enforcement officers – or whether they have been bribed. It is down to instant algorithms, which by their very nature are much harder to tamper with.

You cannot just become an Uber driver and you cannot get away with poor or shoddy services: there are numerous rules and the company will “deactivate” you if there is the slightest whiff of trouble. And with AirBnB, heaven help you if you have a bad day as a poor review will haunt you for eternity.

The ire of taxi drivers who paid dearly for their licences and hotels which invested heavily in their product are justified and no one would wish to see them disappear down the road of horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps. But the genie has been let out of the bottle and there is no going back.