"The new 2010s phenomenon is the person who's renting out their personal apartment intermittently, and which current regulations are too inflexible to accommoda

"The new 2010s phenomenon is the person who's renting out their personal apartment intermittently, and which current regulations are too inflexible to accommodate." I'm not a fan of regulation by any means as I see it adding to the cost of products and service. But by and large they also exist to protect people from their folly and what they don't know about. (The cancer comes of course from when that theory gets out of whack or when groups take advantage of that to exclude legitimate operators..) "Does the fact that we should let kids run lemonade stands without being hassled also mean that full-scale commercial hotels in Brooklyn should be unlicensed and not subject to health/safety inspections?" Kids running lemonade stands where you see the kids are running the stand is a risk any typical person would know exists (since they don't know if the kid mixed the lemonade or a parent etc. So they can judge the risk. (Besides being clearly grandfathered in so many ways.)) But kids making lemondade and selling it to the corner store is a risk that people need to be protected against. The key being is a person reasonably able to know the risk that is involved in what they are doing. So in the case of airbnb I'm not sure people understand the risk they are taking when doing this on a large scale (both from the renting end and the using end). And that is what they need to be protected against.