The title of this essay may seem surprising. What does Uber, a transportation service considered an exemplar of the “sharing economy,” have to do with Internet regulation? What does common carriage, a regulatory construct most commonly associated with railroads in the nineteenth century and telephones in the twentieth century, have to do with Uber? Also, why does the answer even matter? These are precisely the sort of questions we should ponder if we truly care about the future of Internet regulation. Twenty years after the privatization of the network backbone and the birth of the commercial web, the world has changed. The Internet is no longer just a communications network to move digital bits. Its most significant manifestations involve reshaping markets and social relationships in the physical world. These “Internet-enabled” services use digital and mobile connectivity to coordinate the distribution of resources, such as transportation services and lodging. The scale of such online/offline hybrids, including Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Lyft, now frequently exceeds that of their long-established competitors. Additionally, their influence on basic social functions, such as transportation and housing, promises to be even more significant than their financial impact. In such an environment, we must look at regulation differently. It makes little sense to enforce a strict separation between the cyber world and the physical world when firms increasingly straddle both. Moving beyond the rhetoric of regulatory obligations primarily as limitations to be overcome, the positive value of public policy to stimulate investment and innovation should be disinterred. Notions of common carriage and public utilities, once unmoored from their historical associations with sanctioned monopolies and rate * Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Contact: werbach@wharton.upenn.edu. I/S: A JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 136 I/S: A JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY [Vol. 12:1 regulation, can function as framing devices for the regulatory questions of the twenty years to come. Increasingly, their application will be to companies that operate over the network, rather than to just connectivity providers. This essay explores a future of Internet regulation that draws on the valuable attributes of longstanding doctrines to craft a viable regime for the future. Part I describes the rise of Internet-enabled network services, with Uber as the paradigmatic case. Part II explains how these services function as utilities and identifies the major regulatory conflict points. Part III speculates on how these issues may be resolved.