How Airbnb Stopped Playing Nice | Hacker News Reader

How Airbnb Stopped Playing Nice

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35 pointsmirandak49 comments

The fact here is that local laws are not set up for national marketplaces. Airbnb, Uber, and others have hit a scale and a level of consolidation where they become the easiest channel to try and enforce compliance with local regulations. It's easier to go after Airbnb than try and ferret out 100,000 individual hosts who may or may not be following the law.

Remember, the marketplace idea isn't new. We didn't see this level of institutional resistance to eBay or Craigslist.

And here's where I'm torn. Airbnb can no more take legal liability for individual hosts following local tax and zoning regulations than eBay can take liability for sellers hawking children's toys with lead-based paint or Craigslist to ensure the safety of their personal ads.

There is, however, a commercial benefit--and ideally a societal requirement--to help ensure safety of renters on the platform (attracts customers and eliminates bad actors). I'm not sure I agree that Airbnb should be a de facto compliance arm of the local government... that's a gray area.

I don't know if I'm convinced that Airbnb has stopped being "nice", but they are playing at the adults table now.

> And here's where I'm torn. Airbnb can no more take legal liability for individual hosts following local tax and zoning regulations than eBay can take liability for sellers hawking children's toys with lead-based paint or Craigslist to ensure the safety of their personal ads.

I think the difference in my mind is that eBay, CL, etc. are second-hand markets. They're just a digital version of the classified ads in the newspaper or a bulletin board at a coffee shop, and there's no permit required to list your old car in the newspaper.

Uber & Airbnb also have analog analogues, but they are rooted in the service industries. As this article touched on, Airbnb hosts are basically just independent Bed & Breakfast hosts. Uber drivers are just independent cabbies. In both cases, cities have had laws in place for years to address issues of safety, taxation, and oversight. The only difference now is that online booking services have popped up that will allow anyone to sign up as a provider.

I think the best approach is two-pronged. On one side, drivers and hosts should be legally required to get the necessary permits the same as any non-digital provider. They should be required to visibly post their permits and should be subject to the possibility of audit. Maybe the current laws on the books could be revised to streamline the permitting process or lower some hurdles to make it easier for part-timers, but to me that's a separate issue.

On the flip side, Uber & Airbnb should be strongly incentivized to build some checks in their system to prevent individuals from blatantly breaking these laws. Sites like the Pirate Bay have been repeatedly subject to take-downs and legal action for simply facilitating peer-to-peer sharing despite not hosting any infringing content on their own servers. It's hard to see why Uber or Airbnb are any different.

> Sites like the Pirate Bay have been repeatedly subject to take-downs and legal action for simply facilitating peer-to-peer sharing despite not hosting any infringing content on their own servers. It's hard to see why Uber or Airbnb are any different.

I think Hollywood has been combating the pirates for a long time, and has used the law to try and get their way. Maybe if massive hotel chains start to see a severe hit to their revenue they might take legal action similar to what the entertainment industry has done.

It's a spectrum. Compare Airbnb to Craigslist, VBRO, or HomeAway. Airbnb layers on additional services: payment processing, mainly. Some ratings data as well, but VBRO has that, too. Not wildly different, and—at least in my mind—Airbnb "hosts" aren't "independent hoteliers under a central brand".

Here's another interesting hospitality analog: all the big chains are franchises. If I own a Marriott in Des Moines and don't pay my taxes or follow building codes, is Marriott International liable? (I really don't know: "it's complex" is probably the real answer.)

Uber is a step further towards the service economy. In all these cases, and going back to my central thesis here: "local laws are not set up for national marketplaces". I think these guys do bear some responsibility, but at the same time, you can't just require them and individuals to follow the current process because it doesn't work. Taxi medallions in NYC cost a million dollars.

I think Airbnb and Uber are incentivized to build checks into their systems, because they add assurances to their customers: both suppliers and users.

Is any of this surprising to anyone? Airbnb is battling laws (often arbitrarily set with a healthy does of lobbying from established industries) that create undue burden on itself and its business. The same way Netflix battles anti net neutrality laws, Uber battles Taxi regulations, Google battles right to be forgotten and data storage rules, and almost every other company in almost every other industry fights against restrictions which don't occur naturally in the market.

Now there's a balance here. For example, the Koch brothers fight against environmental regulations, the lifting of which would clearly help their business but hurt a great number of people. But for companies which are leveraging internet technology, network effects, and markets which are inefficient only because they are not national or international and benefit a great number of people through lower prices and a better experience, I can't help but root for them to overcome regulation and outdated laws.

That's the saddest tweet I've ever seen.

(https://twitter.com/hopewell828/status/425777540624424960?re...)

I didn't realise until the abrupt ending that this was an advert.

Ugh.

A book excerpt is not an advert.

I wonder if the different dispositions of the companies in the first few years were simply a consequence of founders' personalities, relative market conditions, or the way the companies grew. Would Uber have been less combative if it had grown up in YC?

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