Welcome to a tech policy podcast. I'm Ashken Kazarian. On today's show, we're going to talk about Florida and what it's doing in the sharing economy space.

Joining me, I have Spence Pernell, policy analyst at the Reason Foundation. Spence, welcome to a show.

Thank you for having me. So what is going on? You guys right now have an active bill that's going to cover car sharing. And before we go into that,

for our listeners who might be confused, do you mind telling them the difference between car sharing

and ride sharing? Because even I was confused before you explained it to me. Sure. So ride sharing

generally refers to leasing or borrowing a car for 24 hours or less.

So you can think of Uber or Lyft or even Zipcar, you know, anything less than 24 hours is generally

considered ride sharing. More than 24 hours is considered a rental car. And that is really kind of at the crux of this issue

is what defines a rental car and what might that subject to taxation and regulation-wise.

Is this a definition that only exists in Florida or would you say based on your expertise

that other states have the same definition

and the difference between car sharing and red shoring?

Other states have this distinction as well.

Okay, perfect.

So moving on, what is the bill, the active bill about?

And I heard that there's a possibility

similar bills might pop up in other states.

Correct, yeah.

So this is mostly in response to the rise of a company called Turo,

which is a car-sharing company in the true sense of the word. It's similar to Airbnb,

and that the private individual owns the asset, and the platform Turo is there to just facilitate the

digital exchange of information. They don't actually own any of the cars or any of the assets.

...