11 ms·

The New Innovation Battlegrounds Are City Hall And The State House

61 points by pg 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago
I don't like the phrase "sharing economy" because I think that's a misdescription of what's actually happening. There is no sharing, in the sense of concurrent use. What's happening, instead, is that technology is enabling more fine grained transactions in property. If you imagine a set of property rights as a multi-dimensional space, technology lowers the transaction costs involved in splitting up and transacting in sub-spaces of the larger set, and so makes such transactions practical. See: Coase's "The Nature of the Firm." Sharing is something different. Sharing involves concurrent use of resources mediated by tort-like systems, rather than property-like systems. A real "sharing economy" in cars might be what you end up when cars become self-driving. You won't own a car, but will use whichever car is nearby, and the law will punish various relevant anti-social behaviors instead of violations of property rights. This distinction is very relevant to things like Uber or AirBnB, because the regulatory challenges there are various issues attached to property rights (e.g. zoning restrictions attached to houses, monopoly privileges attached to taxi medallions). I agree with Genachowski that state and local governments are a battleground for innovation, but he makes it seem simpler than it is. It's not just a matter of preventing local governments from enacting laws that restrict innovation. It's more basic: renegotiating various privileges that have been negotiated into and priced into property rights. E.g. for better or worse, those who own cab medallions bargained for the monopoly they have, and gave up certain things in the process. Municipalities bargained to create telephone monopolies to serve rural areas instead of building infrastructure themselves. People who bought houses in residential neighborhoods did so pricing in the fact that those neighborhoods would not host hotels. Everyone thought these were reasonable policies at the time. Upsetting those settled expectations in property rights is going to be a very complicated process. E.g. my personal regulatory interest is in spectrum sharing technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum). Technology is getting close to the point where real "sharing" should be possible in radio spectrum. Not just fine-grained subdivision of property rights, but concurrent use mediated by tort-like mechanisms of enforcing "sociable" behavior. I think that technology needs to be rolled out all over the TV bands and the cellular bands. But it's not just a simple matter of flipping a switch. Verizon and AT&T paid billions for their spectrum, under the assumption that there would be nobody else playing in it. You have to kind of see their point of view in opposition to measures to enable sharing on their property. Same for all of the TV companies. They didn't pay for their spectrum, but they made tremendous investments based on certain assumptions, and they've got a right to question changes to those settled expectations. Incidentally, this is not a new problem. The whole point of property rights is to settle expectations. When the situation changes dramatically, either because of technological or sociological changes, it is a political challenge to accommodate that change without trampling over those settled expectations.
- malandrew 13y ago
  I too don't like that term. It papers over the basic economic motivations of self interested agents. My GF did a documentary on couchsurfing and she's always "sharing economy this.. sharing economy that". It's a useful simplification for non technical people who don't want to delve into the economics of the situation, but it also limits the level of discourse we have as a society.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  >People who bought houses in residential neighborhoods did so pricing in the fact that those neighborhoods would not host hotels. but they didn't price in the risk of technological innovation like AirBNB. the corner stone in your logic (and in modern economy) is property rights. With my background (USSR), i'm used to think of property rights not of as something God given, instead as of something that was invented at some point and has been very useful so far in the development of our civilization. The property rights itself has evolved, from slavery societies to the modern day, from people as a property to ideas and RF spectrum being considered as property. The property rights will continue to evolve, and probably, God forbid - my townhouse is well over-water now, real estate rights disappear, while rights for DNA or human soul(mental footprint, dreams, etc..), something like this will come, or one day property rights, as exclusive license on something, will just stop being useful for human civilization at all.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    >>but they didn't price in the risk of technological innovation like AirBNB Actually that's what they did, since residential usage like AirBNB is generally against zoning in these areas. And you're focused on the selfish aspects of property rights without considering the benefits towards the commons they can confer, like keeping quiet residential areas quiet residential areas rather than high-traffic transient areas just because someone threw up a website.
    - VladRussian2 13y ago
      >Actually that's what they did, since residential usage like AirBNB is generally against zoning in these areas. you're missing my point that property rights and laws(zoning) change with (in response, forced by) technological development and innovation. >And you're focused on the selfish aspects of property rights without considering the benefits towards the commons they can confer again, my point was that specific property rights have their time when they are actually helping advancing the civilization, yet they are meaningless before their time and delay progress after. As AirBNB helps more fully utilize buildings, it seems it is a plus for civilization and the laws/zoning preventing effective use of resources start to become obstacles in the way of progress.
cgshaw 13y ago
Much of this has to do with the systemic aging of our elected officials. Look at the federal level, where the average age of a Rep is 59 and Sen is 63. These are folks who not only don't empathize with modern technology, they've got established connections to big industries that are threatened by innovation. I'm not meaning to come off like a ideologue, it's just economics and incentives. Until younger folks get more involved, it likely won't improve much. (like SOPA/PIPA, but more consistent in advocacy and running for office). Clinton ran for congress in his 20's, lost, but was elected Governor in his early 30's. Joe Biden was a U.S. Senator at the age of 30. People in their late 20's and early 30's just aren't positioned to run for office in our generation. Debt, schooling, careers, etc prevent many from being able to do it, even if they wanted to.
- cgshaw 13y ago
  Put another way, people like Zuckerberg, Chesky, Houston, etc. are having an amazing impact in business, but there isn't anyone close in the political world. Sadly, even if "veterans" like Dorsey, Page, Brin were to run for federal office, they would be amongst the youngest to serve.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    There is no world in which someone who first started a web company in the late 1990s is a "veteran", though, not even in tech. JWZ is more of a veteran than Sergey Brin is. Even if you arbitrarily want to restrict your scope to Googlers: Peter Norvig, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson are decent examples of veteran technologists who've seen a few changes of both technical and business environments, and have some basis for comparison. Brin, Zuckerberg, and Page don't really have that kind of experience.
    - cgshaw 13y ago
      That's why I used the quotes. I was more or less trying to draw the distinction that in some fields, sports, entertainment, and at least some technology enterprises youth wins out. Recently it was determined that by industry, technology is one of the "youngest" industries with an average ago of 30. That puts tech close to retail and food service. I think it was Forbes, I can't find the link though.
microcolonel 13y ago
Does anyone pick up on how fundamentally insane this whole deal is? Why exactly do we have to submit to this nonsense? A world where it's possible for people to ambiguously decide whether or not it's okay to simply organize taxi rides, or share a room you own and operate, because some government-sanctioned oligopoly doesn't like it… How did we get here? I'd love it if people would venture to refute me on this rather than simply downvoting my posts.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- woofyman 13y ago
  If you live in a Condo, you've agreed to the by laws of the association. If you lease, you've signed a contract with your landlord.
  - microcolonel 13y ago
    Voluntarily at that, isn't that great? Your landlords should not be encouraged to peek into my apartment.
    - woofyman 13y ago
      Why do you feel you can ignore the terms of a contract you voluntarily signed ?
      - JoshTriplett 13y ago
        The root comment of this thread was talking about government regulation. You responded with a comment about contracts with landlords or condo associations, to which the response was that those are voluntary agreements (by contrast with government regulation). Nothing in that is talking about ignoring the terms of a voluntary contract; the point is that the government regulations that affect businesses like Uber and AirBnB are not voluntary contracts.
soneca 13y ago
I agree with the author in all points he made. But his advices sound to me like he is "preaching to the converted". I don't see a judge or a regulator reading this and considering it a new point of view that may change his analysis of future cases. I imagine that these regulators already have "the focus on customers". And if they don't, it is not because they don't know they should have. Give the "benefit of the doubt" to innovation? Why? "Keep an open mind"? "Use the service"? I don't see any of these arguments as particularly relevant to anyone in power to regulate these markets. I think we (those who stand with innovation) should pay more attention and think harder on our arguments in order to win those battelgrounds.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ojbyrne 13y ago
So essentially the "New Innovation Battlegrounds" can also be described as "Lobbying." Which sounds more like the last gasping death throes of innovation. None of these businesses involve any kind of technological breakthrough that could really disrupt anything, they're basically my business model is better than your business model. Which leads to the obvious question - better for who?
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  That's exactly the point. When two businesses come up against each other, the correct response from government is to step back and let them fight it out, not to favor one over the other. Lobbying to curry favor for your business is abominable; lobbying to eliminate favors given to your competitor and level the playing field is completely reasonable.
sdrinf 13y ago
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?
- essayist 13y ago
  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.
- quanticle 13y ago
  "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.
ballard 13y ago
A shining counter-example to this article's core argument is the city of SF. They release tons-and-tons of data in hopes more people make cool new apps with it in ways they didn't think of. http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/open-data-page/ http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/open-data-page/ https://data.sfgov.org/ https://data.sfgov.org/ In general though, NYC especially appears to leading an ultimately bankrupt, economically-ignorant policy of pandering to monopolies. Killing innovation hurts the economy and makes cities like NY less desirable. Disruption is competition, and these monopolies better adapt or die.
codex 13y ago
This article claims that some regulations exist to protect certain industries. The proof is the fact that these regulations are harmful to various new startups but not to existing industry. But that's not proof: that's correlation without causation. It is just as likely, if not more likely, that certain regulations were instituted to protect the public or to perform a public good, and the current industries have evolved, like an organism, to coexist with the regulations. Just because an industry has adapted to work within the law does not mean that the law was put in place to protect that industry. For example, NYC regs which are harmful to AirBnB exist to protect other tenants from the insecurities that stem from a revolving door of transients in their buildings. Simliarly, taxi cab medallions restrict supply in order to prevent a tragedy of the commons whereby too many cabs fight for fares in congested city cores, taking up all available road space. In this respect, these startups are not innovative--just stupid enough to operate extra-legally. Just because something can be done more easily with technology does not mean it should be done.
larsonf 13y ago
I read this and kept thinking whether the hotel lobby is really the reason why Airbnb runs into trouble. Or, for that matter, even whether the Taxi Lobby is what is really hitting Uber. Yes, hotel owners and taxi drivers are not exactly pleased about the disruption. And, yes, they have lobbyists to further their causes. But don't think for one second that these people wanted the regulation to begin with. Absolutely not. The regulators wanted to protect the public and put in zoning, licensing, etc. The initial regulation had very little, if anything, to do with turn-of-the-century lobbyists. For the most part it seems these new companies are facing not some nuanced part of the law, but like basic, prehistoric regulation that is practically universal in the Western world, designed to protect people from surpassingly likely horrible practices--like getting kidnapped by an unlicensed driver. Something not that unimaginable -- at least according to London public service posters everywhere. Some laws have very murky reasoning, I'll give you that. But zoning and licensing in these cases do not. So to say that Cities are stifling innovation by enforcing some of the most basic laws of the modern state, then it's a bit glib. Incumbents are mad because they are following the rules and some of these new firms are clearly not. But the incumbents aren't the biggest problem, which the article more or less hints as the culprit. No, the problem for 'innovation' is convincing people why they should let the other half of their duplex run a youth hostel without a license. And no, saying your K-nearest neighbor algorithm's got it covered is not going to be enough. Some might compare this to copyright. And this is where they'd be right. It's not very obvious who copyright protects. No one has ever had a GB of songs cause them to wonder whether their neighborhood is safe anymore. You might even make the same case for fin services. Why regulate those? Well, I'd grant you there too. How many people died from the fin crisis again? Perhaps we are pushing it. Either way, in the land of the physical universe, the universe where Uber and Airbnb are so clearly inhabiting, the reasoning behind the laws is remarkably obvious.
- temphn 13y ago
  > And no, saying your K-nearest neighbor algorithm's got it covered is not going to be enough. This is sheer assertion. What do you think is better? Uber - where you can see your driver's name and photo, know that he has a five star rating with 47/50 positive recommendations, and know that a third party is tracking your GPS location at all times...or the city government's antiquated taxi medallion service? Ditto for Airbnb. > designed to protect people Let's be real here, city government regulations "protect people" in the same way the TSA "protects people". Which is to say they don't and pretend that they do. You're responsible for protecting yourself. The police can't protect you from wandering into a bad neighborhood or even stop you from getting mugged; they can only clean up the mess after the fact. And no cab driver license will replace exercising your judgment before you enter a cab. Moreover, to be "kidnapped by a cabby" is a rare event. It's like soiling our pants over the threat from terrorists, which we've done quite a lot of over the last decade. Enough already.

61 points by pg 13y ago

I don't like the phrase "sharing economy" because I think that's a misdescription of what's actually happening. There is no sharing, in the sense of concurrent use. What's happening, instead, is that technology is enabling more fine grained transactions in property. If you imagine a set of property rights as a multi-dimensional space, technology lowers the transaction costs involved in splitting up and transacting in sub-spaces of the larger set, and so makes such transactions practical. See: Coase's "The Nature of the Firm." Sharing is something different. Sharing involves concurrent use of resources mediated by tort-like systems, rather than property-like systems. A real "sharing economy" in cars might be what you end up when cars become self-driving. You won't own a car, but will use whichever car is nearby, and the law will punish various relevant anti-social behaviors instead of violations of property rights. This distinction is very relevant to things like Uber or AirBnB, because the regulatory challenges there are various issues attached to property rights (e.g. zoning restrictions attached to houses, monopoly privileges attached to taxi medallions). I agree with Genachowski that state and local governments are a battleground for innovation, but he makes it seem simpler than it is. It's not just a matter of preventing local governments from enacting laws that restrict innovation. It's more basic: renegotiating various privileges that have been negotiated into and priced into property rights. E.g. for better or worse, those who own cab medallions bargained for the monopoly they have, and gave up certain things in the process. Municipalities bargained to create telephone monopolies to serve rural areas instead of building infrastructure themselves. People who bought houses in residential neighborhoods did so pricing in the fact that those neighborhoods would not host hotels. Everyone thought these were reasonable policies at the time. Upsetting those settled expectations in property rights is going to be a very complicated process. E.g. my personal regulatory interest is in spectrum sharing technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum). Technology is getting close to the point where real "sharing" should be possible in radio spectrum. Not just fine-grained subdivision of property rights, but concurrent use mediated by tort-like mechanisms of enforcing "sociable" behavior. I think that technology needs to be rolled out all over the TV bands and the cellular bands. But it's not just a simple matter of flipping a switch. Verizon and AT&T paid billions for their spectrum, under the assumption that there would be nobody else playing in it. You have to kind of see their point of view in opposition to measures to enable sharing on their property. Same for all of the TV companies. They didn't pay for their spectrum, but they made tremendous investments based on certain assumptions, and they've got a right to question changes to those settled expectations. Incidentally, this is not a new problem. The whole point of property rights is to settle expectations. When the situation changes dramatically, either because of technological or sociological changes, it is a political challenge to accommodate that change without trampling over those settled expectations.

malandrew 13y ago
I too don't like that term. It papers over the basic economic motivations of self interested agents. My GF did a documentary on couchsurfing and she's always "sharing economy this.. sharing economy that". It's a useful simplification for non technical people who don't want to delve into the economics of the situation, but it also limits the level of discourse we have as a society.
VladRussian2 13y ago
>People who bought houses in residential neighborhoods did so pricing in the fact that those neighborhoods would not host hotels. but they didn't price in the risk of technological innovation like AirBNB. the corner stone in your logic (and in modern economy) is property rights. With my background (USSR), i'm used to think of property rights not of as something God given, instead as of something that was invented at some point and has been very useful so far in the development of our civilization. The property rights itself has evolved, from slavery societies to the modern day, from people as a property to ideas and RF spectrum being considered as property. The property rights will continue to evolve, and probably, God forbid - my townhouse is well over-water now, real estate rights disappear, while rights for DNA or human soul(mental footprint, dreams, etc..), something like this will come, or one day property rights, as exclusive license on something, will just stop being useful for human civilization at all.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  >>but they didn't price in the risk of technological innovation like AirBNB Actually that's what they did, since residential usage like AirBNB is generally against zoning in these areas. And you're focused on the selfish aspects of property rights without considering the benefits towards the commons they can confer, like keeping quiet residential areas quiet residential areas rather than high-traffic transient areas just because someone threw up a website.
  - VladRussian2 13y ago
    >Actually that's what they did, since residential usage like AirBNB is generally against zoning in these areas. you're missing my point that property rights and laws(zoning) change with (in response, forced by) technological development and innovation. >And you're focused on the selfish aspects of property rights without considering the benefits towards the commons they can confer again, my point was that specific property rights have their time when they are actually helping advancing the civilization, yet they are meaningless before their time and delay progress after. As AirBNB helps more fully utilize buildings, it seems it is a plus for civilization and the laws/zoning preventing effective use of resources start to become obstacles in the way of progress.

cgshaw 13y ago

Much of this has to do with the systemic aging of our elected officials. Look at the federal level, where the average age of a Rep is 59 and Sen is 63. These are folks who not only don't empathize with modern technology, they've got established connections to big industries that are threatened by innovation. I'm not meaning to come off like a ideologue, it's just economics and incentives. Until younger folks get more involved, it likely won't improve much. (like SOPA/PIPA, but more consistent in advocacy and running for office). Clinton ran for congress in his 20's, lost, but was elected Governor in his early 30's. Joe Biden was a U.S. Senator at the age of 30. People in their late 20's and early 30's just aren't positioned to run for office in our generation. Debt, schooling, careers, etc prevent many from being able to do it, even if they wanted to.

cgshaw 13y ago
Put another way, people like Zuckerberg, Chesky, Houston, etc. are having an amazing impact in business, but there isn't anyone close in the political world. Sadly, even if "veterans" like Dorsey, Page, Brin were to run for federal office, they would be amongst the youngest to serve.
- _delirium 13y ago
  There is no world in which someone who first started a web company in the late 1990s is a "veteran", though, not even in tech. JWZ is more of a veteran than Sergey Brin is. Even if you arbitrarily want to restrict your scope to Googlers: Peter Norvig, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson are decent examples of veteran technologists who've seen a few changes of both technical and business environments, and have some basis for comparison. Brin, Zuckerberg, and Page don't really have that kind of experience.
  - cgshaw 13y ago
    That's why I used the quotes. I was more or less trying to draw the distinction that in some fields, sports, entertainment, and at least some technology enterprises youth wins out. Recently it was determined that by industry, technology is one of the "youngest" industries with an average ago of 30. That puts tech close to retail and food service. I think it was Forbes, I can't find the link though.

microcolonel 13y ago

Does anyone pick up on how fundamentally insane this whole deal is? Why exactly do we have to submit to this nonsense? A world where it's possible for people to ambiguously decide whether or not it's okay to simply organize taxi rides, or share a room you own and operate, because some government-sanctioned oligopoly doesn't like it… How did we get here? I'd love it if people would venture to refute me on this rather than simply downvoting my posts.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
woofyman 13y ago
If you live in a Condo, you've agreed to the by laws of the association. If you lease, you've signed a contract with your landlord.
- microcolonel 13y ago
  Voluntarily at that, isn't that great? Your landlords should not be encouraged to peek into my apartment.
  - woofyman 13y ago
    Why do you feel you can ignore the terms of a contract you voluntarily signed ?
    - JoshTriplett 13y ago
      The root comment of this thread was talking about government regulation. You responded with a comment about contracts with landlords or condo associations, to which the response was that those are voluntary agreements (by contrast with government regulation). Nothing in that is talking about ignoring the terms of a voluntary contract; the point is that the government regulations that affect businesses like Uber and AirBnB are not voluntary contracts.

soneca 13y ago

I agree with the author in all points he made. But his advices sound to me like he is "preaching to the converted". I don't see a judge or a regulator reading this and considering it a new point of view that may change his analysis of future cases. I imagine that these regulators already have "the focus on customers". And if they don't, it is not because they don't know they should have. Give the "benefit of the doubt" to innovation? Why? "Keep an open mind"? "Use the service"? I don't see any of these arguments as particularly relevant to anyone in power to regulate these markets. I think we (those who stand with innovation) should pay more attention and think harder on our arguments in order to win those battelgrounds.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

ojbyrne 13y ago

So essentially the "New Innovation Battlegrounds" can also be described as "Lobbying." Which sounds more like the last gasping death throes of innovation. None of these businesses involve any kind of technological breakthrough that could really disrupt anything, they're basically my business model is better than your business model. Which leads to the obvious question - better for who?

JoshTriplett 13y ago
That's exactly the point. When two businesses come up against each other, the correct response from government is to step back and let them fight it out, not to favor one over the other. Lobbying to curry favor for your business is abominable; lobbying to eliminate favors given to your competitor and level the playing field is completely reasonable.

sdrinf 13y ago

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?

essayist 13y ago
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.
quanticle 13y ago
"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.

ballard 13y ago

A shining counter-example to this article's core argument is the city of SF. They release tons-and-tons of data in hopes more people make cool new apps with it in ways they didn't think of. http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/open-data-page/ http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/open-data-page/ https://data.sfgov.org/ https://data.sfgov.org/ In general though, NYC especially appears to leading an ultimately bankrupt, economically-ignorant policy of pandering to monopolies. Killing innovation hurts the economy and makes cities like NY less desirable. Disruption is competition, and these monopolies better adapt or die.

codex 13y ago

This article claims that some regulations exist to protect certain industries. The proof is the fact that these regulations are harmful to various new startups but not to existing industry. But that's not proof: that's correlation without causation. It is just as likely, if not more likely, that certain regulations were instituted to protect the public or to perform a public good, and the current industries have evolved, like an organism, to coexist with the regulations. Just because an industry has adapted to work within the law does not mean that the law was put in place to protect that industry. For example, NYC regs which are harmful to AirBnB exist to protect other tenants from the insecurities that stem from a revolving door of transients in their buildings. Simliarly, taxi cab medallions restrict supply in order to prevent a tragedy of the commons whereby too many cabs fight for fares in congested city cores, taking up all available road space. In this respect, these startups are not innovative--just stupid enough to operate extra-legally. Just because something can be done more easily with technology does not mean it should be done.

larsonf 13y ago

I read this and kept thinking whether the hotel lobby is really the reason why Airbnb runs into trouble. Or, for that matter, even whether the Taxi Lobby is what is really hitting Uber. Yes, hotel owners and taxi drivers are not exactly pleased about the disruption. And, yes, they have lobbyists to further their causes. But don't think for one second that these people wanted the regulation to begin with. Absolutely not. The regulators wanted to protect the public and put in zoning, licensing, etc. The initial regulation had very little, if anything, to do with turn-of-the-century lobbyists. For the most part it seems these new companies are facing not some nuanced part of the law, but like basic, prehistoric regulation that is practically universal in the Western world, designed to protect people from surpassingly likely horrible practices--like getting kidnapped by an unlicensed driver. Something not that unimaginable -- at least according to London public service posters everywhere. Some laws have very murky reasoning, I'll give you that. But zoning and licensing in these cases do not. So to say that Cities are stifling innovation by enforcing some of the most basic laws of the modern state, then it's a bit glib. Incumbents are mad because they are following the rules and some of these new firms are clearly not. But the incumbents aren't the biggest problem, which the article more or less hints as the culprit. No, the problem for 'innovation' is convincing people why they should let the other half of their duplex run a youth hostel without a license. And no, saying your K-nearest neighbor algorithm's got it covered is not going to be enough. Some might compare this to copyright. And this is where they'd be right. It's not very obvious who copyright protects. No one has ever had a GB of songs cause them to wonder whether their neighborhood is safe anymore. You might even make the same case for fin services. Why regulate those? Well, I'd grant you there too. How many people died from the fin crisis again? Perhaps we are pushing it. Either way, in the land of the physical universe, the universe where Uber and Airbnb are so clearly inhabiting, the reasoning behind the laws is remarkably obvious.

temphn 13y ago
> And no, saying your K-nearest neighbor algorithm's got it covered is not going to be enough. This is sheer assertion. What do you think is better? Uber - where you can see your driver's name and photo, know that he has a five star rating with 47/50 positive recommendations, and know that a third party is tracking your GPS location at all times...or the city government's antiquated taxi medallion service? Ditto for Airbnb. > designed to protect people Let's be real here, city government regulations "protect people" in the same way the TSA "protects people". Which is to say they don't and pretend that they do. You're responsible for protecting yourself. The police can't protect you from wandering into a bad neighborhood or even stop you from getting mugged; they can only clean up the mess after the fact. And no cab driver license will replace exercising your judgment before you enter a cab. Moreover, to be "kidnapped by a cabby" is a rare event. It's like soiling our pants over the threat from terrorists, which we've done quite a lot of over the last decade. Enough already.