Comment by 7Figures2Commas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 7Figures2Commas | Hacker News Reader

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7Figures2Commas

I was expecting a response like this, and it completely misses the point of my comment. Notwithstanding the potential benefits to hosts and guests in ensuring that activity on AirBnB is above board, I focused on a simple question: even if AirBnB doesn't have a legal obligation to help enforce private contracts, does AirBnB not have a moral obligation to address the issue because it is almost certainly aware that a good number of its hosts are violating them?

It seems like your response is "AirBnB has no moral obligation to try to discourage its hosts from violating an agreement it knows likely exists", but I'm curious as to why you chose to throw this back to me as a question rather than stating a concrete opinion. Do you hold other companies to this same standard, and are you comfortable stating on record that what's good for the goose is always good for the gander? If so, why disguise your opinion as a question?

On the point of corporate morality, I'd note that companies in certain industries are frequently lambasted for acting amorally. Just look in finance. Big banks, mortgage lenders, hedge funds, high frequency traders. They face almost constant criticism for engaging in behavior or failing to prevent behavior, even when their actions do not violate the letter of the law.

Are there no AirBnB supporters who have criticized other companies for amoral behavior?

At least, with the finance industry, those entities are directly perpetrating and in control of the immoral behavior, rather than acting as a proxy/facilitator for entities that might be doing it. I would think this situation is more akin to hosting copyrighted content, where we're finding that service providers aren't held liable (morally or legally) as long as they comply with requests to take down specific offending material.

As a side note, look how often that criticism of the finance industry amounts to any real effect on those companies. If that's the model we're looking at, the prevailing wisdom says to just do it and ignore the critics.

Also I think most people just aren't that concerned about the sanctity of HOAs and residential lease agreements (compared to, say, the global economy), and those are easier to amend and negotiate on than laws.

You seem to be of the belief that a) financial institutions never play the limited role of facilitator and b) entities which facilitate transactions are somehow less culpable when they know that the transactions they are facilitating are ethically questionable. You're wrong on both counts.

Many financial institutions facilitate transactions. Goldman Sachs paid over half a billion dollars to settle charges related to the Abacus deal it facilitated in 2007.[1] Goldman was paid a $15 million fee for facilitating that deal, a meaningless fraction of the $46 billion in revenues it earned in 2007.

As I noted, the vast majority of apartment leases forbid subletting without the landlord's approval, and you would be hard pressed to find a single landlord who allows tenants to turn their apartments into hotel suites. As such, one could argue that as far as apartments go, this isn't a "might" proposition. There's a very reasonable argument to be made that AirBnB can safely assume that apartment listings on its site more often than not involve a tenant breaking the terms of his or her lease.

If you don't have a problem with AirBnB facilitating apartment rentals in the face of constructive knowledge that many of them are taking place in violation of the terms of the host's lease, that's fine. But then you shouldn't have a problem with financial institutions when they merely facilitate transactions that don't pass your smell test. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

[1] http://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/case-studies/goldman-sachs-...

From the perspective of a home owner, if I rented my flat out, I'd definitely include a no subletting clause. I'd also love to have a way to temporarily blacklist my property on AirBnB and other such sites.

Well the hilarious part is that AirBnB now requires guests to prove who they are by posting a passport.

It wouldn't be rocket science to require hosts to prove that they have ownership or approval to let out their flats (i mean, you can look up property ownership info online for most US cities). Especially since, from the host's perspective it's not a 1 time transaction.

They're just skirting the law because it's convenient.

That's really splitting hairs.

It's pretty obvious that turning an apartment into a hotel room is a legal problem in many if not most instances. Making the claim that "people just aren't that concerned about the sanctity of HOAs and residential leases" is just plain delusional. You'll get concerned when your lease gets terminated or the HOA takes up action against you.

The whole situation is a moral hazard -- the owner/lessee of the apartment/house bears almost all of the risks. AirBnB just needs to keep the PR machine churning. That's why they have figured out how to verify the identity of renters (to address the issue of some sort of psycho serial killer renting rooms), but still find it impossible to confirm that lessees of property can in fact rent those rooms.

There's both the letter and the spirit of the private contracts.

Some HOAs are restrictive on sublets and some newer ones explicitly prohibit short-term rentals or require an owner live-in minimums. The question is why?

The spirit of such regulations is that long-term owners, who typically rule the HOA, don't want their complex/neighborhood to be used for short-term parties, which brings noise concerns, safety concerns, possibilities of vandalism, etc.

If that is going to happen, HOA has the means to nab the offending owner, usually start him off with a warning, and later move that up to penalties or whatever other means they have at their disposal. If that never happens, HOA will stay mum.

Why should AirBnb get in front of the issue that's self-solving?

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