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Comment by sdrinf | Hacker News Reader

A thought experiment, at the risk of being downvoted to oblivion:

Imagine a new online service, which allows people to rent out their existing accounts at various other SAAS services to tenants, in exchange for a cut (specifically eg. you can share your seomoz account with 2 other people, tossing the $99 + cut inbetween them, each tenant taking one of the slots).

Consumers benefit from radically lowered prices, enabled by "more fine grained transaction in property".

Would you accomodate this sort of usage on your own sites? If not, what specific principle would you suggest, which still allows for AirBNB?

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"Imagine a new online service, which allows people to rent out their existing accounts at various other SAAS services to tenants, in exchange for a cut (specifically eg. you can share your seomoz account with 2 other people, tossing the $99 + cut inbetween them, each tenant taking one of the slots)."

Isn't that analogous to a sublet arrangement at an apartment? You take a, let's say, 3 bedroom apartment and sublet two of the bedrooms to room-mates. Many landlords allows and welcome subletting, as it allows them to more quickly find tenants for their larger units. At the same time, other landlords don't see the hassle and potential drama of subletting as worth the cost and prohibit the practice.

In the same way, I can see SAAS providers going two ways on this. Some might welcome your "sublet as a service" and explicitly take advantage of it as a way to broaden the market that they serve. Others might view it as a way to exploit their service and explicitly write anti-subletting terms into their terms of use.

Fair point.

If you own the condo or house that's being AirBNB'd, then we're ok (modulo pissing off the neighbors).

If you're renting, then we're getting into the same territory as "unlimited bandwidth" subscriptions for ISPs or cellphones. Landlords -- reasonable, non-legalistic ones -- might then want to specify the maximum number of "person nights", etc., since all of a sudden "having a few friends spend the night" (taking the # of occupants over the lease maximum) becomes a permanent thing.

It's a little like a tenant who takes a dozen showers a day, every day for a year. Leases don't generally specify the maximum number of showers permitted, but they might begin to do so.

So, it could be workable, if the various contractual arrangements could be adjusted.

Disclaimer: I'm a (small-time) landlord.

Interesting thought experiment, but I think the case can be made that the software industry has already dealt with this.

1. Matlab and other expensive per-seat licenses are indeed shared, and there are license managers available

2. Other SAAS services are priced cheaply enough that it's not worth sharing vs. having it private

3. SAAS services are often customized enough to the individual that the utility of sharing them isn't that high

4. People already do share logins all the time within businesses and there are now services (like Meldium) that are set up to productize this

So actually it's an interesting thought experiment, but perhaps cuts in the opposite direction.

This is like sharing a college parking pass. Both usually have terms that state you can't share the lease, but fundamentally the problem is that mutual resources (parking spots, server bandwidth) are shared and hard to discretize to a consumer of them, and their "optimal" state is peak shared utilization, where licenses, accounts, and caps inhibit utilization intentionally to keep the saturation from degrading the system (see how public roads that don't get expanded in 30 years get).

I think it has been pretty consistently shown peak productivity gains are reaped when best-shared resources are made readily available with no barriers to utilization, but you need a pool of supporters to keep the infrastructure constantly expanding to meet demand. Throwing new servers in / paying the electric bill, building a new parking lot / maintaining the one that gets heavily treaded by saturation, or expanding / paving roads.

The most technologically functional way is to just announce traffic utilization, expansion costs, and play the wikipedia model - crowdfund your operating costs because the resources are not easily discretized into optimally-used per-consumer chunks. In public space, this is through taxes, but I don't think they have to be in the modern instant global information communication era. Or bill / meter for time used, rather than a constant subscription (which is, strangely, what mobile ISPs are doing now. The problem with that service is they use their metering to artificially depress demand so they don't need to invest in expanding their infrastructure).

You know, that is an interesting thought experiment - how would society organize if people were paying a bill for miles driven to cover road maintenance / expansion costs? (in some places this is already a partial funding source through petrol taxes, but since taxed funds usually end up in a giant pot that various organizations pull from the correlation of tax revenue from travel expenses to available funds to maintain / expand roads isn't a direct one). If we transitioned to more electric vehicles that might be harder, though.

This already happens to some degree; it's very common for web design companies to also handle hosting and mailing lists on behalf of their clients, and there are plans built specifically around this kind of need. Back to you example, you are doing the market segmentation and sales work for SEOMoz, so I don't see why they would mind. It's better for them to receive $299/month from three users than NOT receive the same amount from one user.

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