The Uber revolution is just beginning, and no cabbie protest can stop it

The so-called 'sharing economy' has already disrupted a lot more than traffic. If peer-to-peer startups are too cheap and easy for an eroding global middle class to ignore, what happens next?

Taxi drivers went on strike for a day in several European cities on Wednesday, leading, apparently, to "traffic chaos" from London to Berlin and Paris to Madrid. Here in Barcelona, I barely noticed – largely because my hotel is a 10-minute walk from the conference where I'm speaking, and especially because the city's public mass transit system is superb. And so the mass anti-Uber protest was meaningless.

A fellow attendee did notice a jam, however, when he queued up for a bus after arriving Wednesday evening from Italy. Taxis weren't picking up customers, but they were circling around the arrivals area, horns honking, just to make their point.