"Second, I feel in some sense, the tide is turning the other way on the regulation front." If a business makes sense, and consumers get a taste of it and have

"Second, I feel in some sense, the tide is turning the other way on the regulation front." If a business makes sense, and consumers get a taste of it and have positive experiences, it's very hard to stop[1]. Institutional inefficiencies usually only last when better solutions are adequately hidden from consumers. I was pretty skeptical of AirBnb a while ago because I underestimated the effectiveness of trust and rating systems. I thought that the initial excitement was really just because the system masked the risks people were taking. I should have known from eBay that it can be done. If they do have the trust thing worked out pretty well, then it's a very solid business model. Net travel from any one city is generally close to zero[2], so having a ton of hotels is pretty inefficient. (I'm not an airbnb user, but I see why it's appealing.) [1] It could really only be stopped if airbnb were somehow vilified. For instance, if newspapers started running stories like "downtown overrun by out-of-town vandals using airbnb" (just to give an absurd example). [2] It varies seasonally, of course, which might mean that there are more people in tourist areas in the summer, causing a need for things like hotels. But many tourist destinations are also major cities, with their own residents leaving on holiday as well.