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Comment by woolvalley | Hacker News Reader

You drag youtube with the DCMA because you don't know the location or person who did the 'upload', so the complaint has to start with the upload spot. The infringing object is also on youtube itself.

With residences you know exactly where it is, ownership is in a very well maintained database and it's not going anywhere. The infringing behavior isn't occurring on airbnb, but in reality.

Complain to your city / HOA, let some sort of due process happen and then have the city / HOA fine the homeowner out of existence until they comply. Expecting airbnb & other tech companies to act like government is not something you want to become a standard practice, because you lose your say in how that gov't works.

It's like forcing newspapers to remove classifieds because people are advertising stuff you don't like.

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I agree with you that I think we need to be careful about asking corporations to be legislative authorities. I'd say this is very similar to the Backpage scandal in which employees were beyond reasonably turning a blind eye to very illegal, preventable behavior happening on their platform. Why not just allow people to involve the authorities in that situation as well?

What I'm proposing seems extremely reasonable considering AirBnB is, at least in NYC and other major metro areas, primarily used for breaking the law.

Here's the thing I think most people are missing: almost every state, city, municipality etc. in existing has laws against short term rentals. The reason for this is very clear because the issues have already been considered at the civic level. There's no reason to think that just because a platform emerged that makes this illegal behavior easier that the behavior has changed. Zoning exists for a reason. People don't want short term rentals. As far as I can tell the vast majority of AirBnB's business is illegal.

This is different from YouTube in that there is a very large legitimate use for YouTube. There is a legitimate use for AirBnB, it's just not $38B large. Asking them to make enforcement easier for externalities seems like a very reasonable alternative to heavy handed government regulation (ie: requiring short term rentals to be registered with cities, which is what cities are doing now to respond to AirBnB's lack of self-policing).

> Zoning exists for a reason. People don't want short term rentals

Zoning exists to separate industry from residential and also to separate middle-class households (people who can afford to use their home only for consumption, whose only animals are pets and whose only crop is grass) from the working-class (people who made income on their home by taking in boarders, growing chickens, doing home businesses, etc.) Middle-class zoning banned these working-class activities (see https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...). I think it’s really tricky to separate who is harming whom in the modern day when houses are seen as an investment and there is insufficient zoning for working-class people, and where the norms of what a house is for may be changing.

Yep, I agree with a lot of your criticisms, but there are a lot of legitimate reasons to not want to live next to a hotel (or farm animals) that aren't about keeping poor people down.

Newspapers actually are forced to take reasonable steps to avoid allowing ads for illegal activity, and owners have been jailed for it. So if making Airbnb police their listings would be like making newspapers police their classifieds, it seems obvious that they should be required to do so. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/top-offic...

Having businesses help people comply with existing laws is not at all uncommon. Ever notice that retail collects sales tax on your behalf when you buy something?

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