Platforms likeTaskRabbit and Hello Alfred have become popular in the field of household chores and on demand services such as picking up groceries, dry cleaning and so on.

These particularly labor-intensive platforms raise a series of challenges for regulators, starting from the issue of the employment relationship. For example, Hello Alfred tried to solve this problem by recognizing as employees those who work through the platform for a given amount of hours per week.

More generally, these platforms exert different degrees of control over the way tasks should be executed and the process of matching between demand and supply, therefore it is not easy to properly classify them: are they pure intermediaries or companies operating outside of the digital sector? According to the classification, which set of rules should be applied to them? Regulators should be ready to answer these questions in order to reduce uncertainty and let markets do their own job under a coherent and clear framework.