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What I dislike the most about Airbnb's whole controversial business model, is how the true innovation they did was bypassing laws. As property listing sites go

What I dislike the most about Airbnb's whole controversial business model, is how the true innovation they did was bypassing laws. As property listing sites go, Airbnb did not produce any true innovation. And although they clearly must have done some things really well to generate so many people using their service(a.k.a. probably taking them out of craigslist), the really true 'innovation' they did was getting away from abiding regulation. Now that they are big, they are going to cooperate as much as possible to build regulatory walls so that another Airbnb wouldnt be able to show up and contest those rates. I have the same feeling from Uber/Lyft. The traditional taxi service is terrible for drivers, and they present true benefits to them: but only because they found a way to bypass the law by paying with the apps instead of giving money to the driver. (If I made a site on my own, and picked up people from the street and the gave me money in hand, i would be breaking the law). Now that they are big enough, they can also influence the rules enough to make it harder for future competition. These strategies can only work when the companies get big enough to influence the law making, or when they have such a strong market dominance(or monopoly) that they can now afford to abide by the rules (or to make them). So, in terms of Airbnb , the only innovative thing they did was finding a law loophole. Woohoo.

untog 12y ago
It's true. The model for startups these days is to get millions of dollars of funding and spend it all on lawyers who can negotiate your ability to work around laws and regulations. While many of those laws and regulations have no place existing, it still feels sad to me.
- XorNot 12y ago
  You would not have this opinion if you have ever had to deal with someone illegally subletting their apartment. Or lived basically anywhere which has uni students.
  - untog 12y ago
    Why? I'm not suggesting all regulation should disappear, just that it's inarguable that some regulation out there is wrong.
  - brc 12y ago
    I think the point is that individual locations should be free to set their own regulations - at the building level at least. But city or state-wide ordnances against subletting or ride-sharing are too broad and allow certain actors to amass too much monopoly power.
    - aestra 12y ago
      >But city or state-wide ordnances against subletting Many places (like NY for example) actually have laws that expressly protect tenants rights to sublet. Landlord tenant laws mostly are there to protect the tenant from unfair slumlords.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    That's just prejudice. Our renters (we own, not sublet) are and have been mostly college students and I wouldn't mind living with most of them. In fact, our biggest problem was with a working mother, who left our place half destroyed.
  - aestra 12y ago
    >Or lived basically anywhere which has uni students. I've never had a problem with uni students in the city I used to live in and a couple lived in my building.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- aestra 12y ago
  >While many of those laws and regulations have no place existing I suppose you wouldn't mind living next to this place then - http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-airbnb-party-house-glendale-20140106-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-airbnb-party-hou... I like my neighbors (except one... that's a different story...) They are friendly. We help each other clean off our cars in the winter. We check on each other's mail, pets, plants, and houses while we are on vacation. We help each other carry heavy items into the house. We are known to each other. I personally wouldn't feel safe with neighbors who revolve every day who have no ties to the community that we built. Not to mention I wouldn't want to pay double rent because of all the houses that are taken off the market.
pcrh 12y ago
I don't think Airbnb merely found a loophole in the law, they found a way to connect small operators to large markets. The small B&B market has been around for a long time, but individual hosts, especially if they are providing only 1 or 2 rooms, previously rarely had the ability to market their services in the way they can with Airbnb.
- larrys 12y ago
  Along the lines of why corporations don't innovate consider that while traditional corporations also use money to fix legal situations or messes they have gotten themselves into, they generally wouldn't enter a market where upfront you know there will be legal problems down the road. It becomes more or less in many situations a non starter.
  - bduerst 12y ago
    That's true of most industries - larger corporations are risk averse and let the market acid-test the startups, which are high risk, and then the corporations acquire the startups that pose a threat. It's crazy stupid that Marriot or Hyatt have not tried to acquire Air BnB.
larrys 12y ago
"The traditional taxi service is terrible for drivers" The traditional taxi service, if bad for drivers, is simply because there are enough drivers that will work and be treated like that to make it terrible for the group as a whole. This happens in any employment situation where supply exceeds demand. Because there is a low barrier to entry to be a driver as well as lack of other opportunities for drivers the people in charge get leverage. Likewise "superstar" developers are treated like royalty and well paid in this industry. If all the sudden there were 4 times the superstar developers vying for jobs (assuming demand stays fixed and a superstar is a superstar) all that would go out the window and wages and benefits would almost certainly drop. I'm a pretty good photographer but decided many years ago that since photography had a low barrier to entry, and only a few made it to the top, wages were decreased by competition to make it a non attractive career.
- coryrc 12y ago
  Except, now Uber/Lyft has vastly increased supply and is better for drivers.
- NhanH 12y ago
  The difference is that in a lot of cases, there are kind of a "hard cap" for demand that can't be increased easily without a lot of factor (accountant, lawyer comes to mind). However, I believe there are certain professions where if you're only concerned with the superstar level, the sky is the limit (demand-wise): there are no artificial (market) cap on the value you can added to the society. That is until human is immortal, energy is unlimited (to a first approximation), and/ or the Singularity happened.
- conanbatt 12y ago
  Supply and demand is not the only actor at play in employment. Otherwise, you wouldnt need minimum wage, or laws of any kind to protect employees (or businesses) from the other side. And also, in the particular taxi-driving business, the problem is not supply/demand of drivers, its of city permits to be a taxi driver. Drivers working for Uber/Lyft do not take the same abuse as taxi drivers. The taxi business is a racket, made by people that took that business, got an advantage in that time, and could make laws to their own benefit. Uber found a loophole in those laws, and got to be a winning player in that market. And now, they are going to be one of the actors in redefining the new set of laws regarding this,
rm445 12y ago
Now hold on. Their innovation was monetizing couch-surfing, the 'sharing economy' as applied to places to sleep. Perhaps you can point to someone earlier who broke the ground, but the perception of the world at large is that Airbnb did it. There are plenty of people who wouldn't be violating any rules or laws by being Airbnb hosts. Clearly the service could exist without anyone bypassing laws. You might instead argue that the business model requires laws to be flouted in order to turn a profit, but I don't see how you'd prove it.
baddox 12y ago
> What I dislike the most about Airbnb's whole controversial business model, is how the true innovation they did was bypassing laws. Why do you dislike that? Is it because you think any business which bypasses laws is inherently bad, or is it because you think these particular laws (zoning, hotel regulations, etc.) are themselves valid and should not be broken?
sillysaurus3 12y ago
As property listing sites go, Airbnb did not produce any true innovation. It innovated so much that it enriched my own life quite substantially. I needed what I was only able to find via Airbnb. And those renting their own places needed the money.
- gaius 12y ago
  And screw the neighbours who never signed up to living in a hotel? All the benefits you and the landlord enjoyed were externalised onto others.
WoodenChair 12y ago
I think you're largely right - but both Uber and Airbnb are therefore testaments to the fact that the laws suck. The arrangements for drivers/riders and renters/rentees seem to be working out well for both sides of the transactions in the vast majority of cases. We should ask ourselves if those regulations should exist in the first place.
vanwesson 12y ago
> the only innovative thing they did was finding a law loophole Don't forget this: http://www.quora.com/Airbnb-Craigslist-Spamming-Controversy http://www.quora.com/Airbnb-Craigslist-Spamming-Controversy
- harimau 12y ago
  Wasn't aware of this but not surprised. My original comment was going to be to the part of "taking them out of craigslist" since people trying to use craigslist have to sift through their ads clogging up stuff.
hershel 12y ago
I'm all for proper regulation. But on the other hand, recent technological advancements hold potential for huge improvements in almost every important industry(for ex. healthcare), but in many cases, are blocked by regulation. Looking at the amount of value such innovations will create , it sometimes seem greatly unethical not to use that loophole.
secabeen 12y ago
AirBNB did have provide a substantial increase in usability compared to their competitors. When I made my first stay in an AirBNB, I was comparing their offerings to those on VRBO.com, which has been listing rentals of this sort since 1995. AirBNB had a vastly better listing engine compared to the Web 1.0-link system VRBO had at the time. Since then, VRBO has gotten a lot better.
ericabiz 12y ago
"As property listing sites go, Airbnb did not produce any true innovation." Strongly disagree. As an Airbnb host (I rent out my master suite on Airbnb), there simply wasn't a site where I could do that before. Craigslist? Forget it--spam heaven, and no calendar or payment system. And VRBO has always been designed for "vacation homes", not "rent a single bedroom in a house you occupy" (which is why I use Airbnb.) I live in Austin, and Austin has responded to Airbnb by making hosts pay hotel tax, and requiring us to register with the city. While an inconvenience, I'd rather do that than not be able to make extra income renting out the room. I hope San Francisco can do something similar (and I really hope Airbnb builds this into their site so I can stop filing paperwork and mailing paper checks every quarter!)
- fred_durst 12y ago
  Maybe the reason an alternative didn't exist because others realized it was against a lot of laws, regulations and tax codes? For example, I could start a service that allows people to make food in their house and sell it online. The reality is that in most municipalities you cannot simply cook food in your kitchen and sell it. The difficult part in Airbnb, Uber and my imaginary sharing economy food service is managing to get big enough before authorities catch on. And getting big fast just happens to be something the VC model is very good at. In my opinion it's more an innovation of hyper growth VC funding as a means to out run authorities enforcing regulations, laws and tax codes as opposed to the innovation of something built into the individual service of Airbnb, Uber etc.
  - bitwarrior 12y ago
    So, guess what Airbnb is doing next? http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/10/airbnbs-stealth-home-dining-experiment-is-going-to-be-awesome/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/10/airbnbs-stealth-home-dinin...
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      haha, yeah, I was just about to point this out. It's quite a bit easier to die from "disruptive food" than "disruptive lodging" in my personal experience from roughing it once upon a time.
paul 12y ago
I think you could make a similar argument for YouTube, but I personally find all of these services to be tremendously valuable and I'm glad that they are working to evolve the law. Laws are written and interpreted within the context of old, established businesses. Innovation will inevitably produce a certain amount of tension with those old laws. One approach for to dealing with this is to ask permission / change the law first, but that will usually fail because the incumbent businesses generally don't like change (imagine trying to get Hollywood's permission to launch YouTube). The second approach is to move forward within the spirit of the law, deliver genuine value to consumers and society, and then work with legislatures and the courts to develop improved laws and understandings of the law.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  First, the YouTube comparison is far less appropriate than you suggest. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains a safe harbor that is designed to shield internet service providers from liability associated with copyright infringment provided that they meet certain criteria. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit determined that YouTube was protected by this safe harbor. Second, and more importantly, you seem to neglect the fact that some AirBnB hosts are not just violating laws, but their leases and HOA rules. These are legally-binding contracts between private individuals. AirBnB's most ardent supporters like to focus on zoning and hospitality laws, suggesting that they're antiquated, anti-competitive, etc. Some of these arguments are quite reasonable in my opinion, but what about private contracts? I have yet to see convincing arguments around the issue of hosts who are violating their contracts with their landlords and/or homeowners associations. Most apartment leases have strict terms around subletting and many HOAs have restrictions around property use that would be in conflict with AirBnB-style short term rentals. Even if AirBnB doesn't have a legal obligation to help enforce these, given the number of listings that are ostensibly governed by leases and/or HOA rules, it seems implausible that AirBnB isn't aware that a good number of its hosts are breaking private contracts, potentially exposing those hosts, their neighbors and even their "guests" to a variety of risks. Does AirBnB not have a moral obligation to address this? I'd love to see more AirBnB supporters take on this issue. At least it would be more entertaining and perhaps even more enlightening than the recurrent arguments against zoning and hospitality laws.
raverbashing 12y ago
"is how the true innovation they did was bypassing laws" Hollywood started in the West Coast so they could be far enough from Edison and his patents A lot less MP3 players would be sold if only legal songs were allowed to be loaded But more importantly, a business goes deeper than a nice website. AirBnB built a business using a website, as opposed to several cases where a website is built and the business comes after (not saying it's wrong)
- pearkes 12y ago
  > Hollywood started in the West Coast so they could be far enough from Edison and his patents If you're curious, as I was, this is a good read: http://www.history.com/news/the-renegade-roots-of-hollywood-studios http://www.history.com/news/the-renegade-roots-of-hollywood-...
simonebrunozzi 12y ago
I couldn't agree more with you. AirBNB, Uber are my top two names. There are others.
jrvarela56 12y ago
Agreed. This does not say as much about Airbnb as it does about how much value is destroyed by outdated, ill-designed regulation.
Mz 12y ago
Eh, laws are written by men. They are not some kind of ethical commandment from god or similar. Lots of laws are even downright unethical and get overturned from time to time. I don't have some strong feeling about what AirBnB has done. I am passingly interested because I previously wanted to be an urban planner, before life got in the way. I find it intriguing that the Internet is reshaping how urban space gets used. We clearly need to create new mental models here. Our old ones are basically dinosaurs that ignore this new reality.
tomphoolery 12y ago
I'm not sure about the comparison with Uber, but I definitely agree with you on how Airbnb's main innovation is finding a loophole around certain laws that are for the benefit of everyone. In Uber's case, however, I believe they were circumventing corrupt laws, put in place to help the medallion holders over anyone else. The taxi dispatch system is antiquated, and if it wasn't Uber or Lyft coming around to change it, it would most certainly have been someone else. I don't believe Uber's only innovation is circumventing laws, because Uber can't be run using a simple spreadsheet. Airbnb can, I know that because it used to be.
brc 12y ago
It's amazing how many business opportunities there are in finding ways to circumvent restrictive regulations. It's almost as if regulations stop people from doing what they want to do and usually only serve a narrow few. Yet year after year, politicians campaign vigorously for re-election by talking about how many new regulations they have written. And anyone who stands up and suggests that maybe a bit of deregulation might be a good idea is branded as someone who is inevitably 'a danger to children/way of life/jobs/etc' So we have a situation where people gladly partake of services which innovate around regulations (usually because it relieves the consumer of the cost of those regulations) yet feel the need to keep returning politicians who promise to create more regulations. The only explanation I have is that most voters think the cost-burden of regulations will always fall on another voter, and that the benefits will flow to them.
nostrademons 12y ago
I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, laws are the product of many years of accumulated experience, and wantonly tearing them down means you will probably eventually hit the exact same issues that necessitated the law's formation in the first place. On the other, laws grow by accretion, they exist within a historical context, and they are virtually impossible to get rid of once they have outgrown that historical context. Pretty much the only way to get a law off the books is to intentionally break it and then build enough popular support during the ensuing test case that you can either get a court to strike it down or a lawmaker to introduce a bill to repeal it. So people who break these laws are sometimes (not always) performing an essential service by forcing society to re-examine the rules it governs itself by and determining whether they still serve the public interest. And you don't know whether they're heroes (think Rosa Parks, the Boston Tea Party, or Sony Betamax) or demons (think Napster or the Unabomber) until public opinion comes down one way or the other. It's also interesting how people's reaction to this seems to illustrate Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Reasoning quite sharply: Stage 1 (avoiding punishment): "AirBnB is fine because it's very unlikely that people will get caught or prosecuted" or "I won't use AirBnB because I'm afraid of getting sued or fined." Stage 2 (self-interest): "AirBnB is a good thing because it lets me rent out a resource I already have and make extra cash." Stage 3 (social approval): "AirBnB is fine because all my friends use it." Stage 4 (law & order): "AirBnB is a plague upon this earth because their business model involves nothing more than systematically breaking laws and profiting from it." Stage 5 (contracts): "People have a right to freely enter into contracts to mutually benefit themselves. AirBnB facilitates these contracts, and therefore is beneficial to society. It is the individual's responsibility to respect contracts they have already entered into with other parties." Stage 6 (justice & universal moral principles): "If I were a host, I would appreciate being able to make extra cash by renting out my place. If I were a guest, I would appreciate the extra housing options. However, if I were a neighbor of a host, I would not appreciate the extra foot traffic and possibilities for damage or altercations. In many cases in today's economy, hosts are strapped for cash, and AirBnB may be their sole source of income. A host's right to make a living and not starve outweighs a neighbor's right to peace and quiet, and so the right choice is to legalize AirBnB but with regulations that can protect the rights of neighbors to the greatest extent possible."
- 12y ago

untog 12y ago

It's true. The model for startups these days is to get millions of dollars of funding and spend it all on lawyers who can negotiate your ability to work around laws and regulations. While many of those laws and regulations have no place existing, it still feels sad to me.

XorNot 12y ago
You would not have this opinion if you have ever had to deal with someone illegally subletting their apartment. Or lived basically anywhere which has uni students.
- untog 12y ago
  Why? I'm not suggesting all regulation should disappear, just that it's inarguable that some regulation out there is wrong.
- brc 12y ago
  I think the point is that individual locations should be free to set their own regulations - at the building level at least. But city or state-wide ordnances against subletting or ride-sharing are too broad and allow certain actors to amass too much monopoly power.
  - aestra 12y ago
    >But city or state-wide ordnances against subletting Many places (like NY for example) actually have laws that expressly protect tenants rights to sublet. Landlord tenant laws mostly are there to protect the tenant from unfair slumlords.
- icebraining 12y ago
  That's just prejudice. Our renters (we own, not sublet) are and have been mostly college students and I wouldn't mind living with most of them. In fact, our biggest problem was with a working mother, who left our place half destroyed.
- aestra 12y ago
  >Or lived basically anywhere which has uni students. I've never had a problem with uni students in the city I used to live in and a couple lived in my building.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
aestra 12y ago
>While many of those laws and regulations have no place existing I suppose you wouldn't mind living next to this place then - http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-airbnb-party-house-glendale-20140106-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-airbnb-party-hou... I like my neighbors (except one... that's a different story...) They are friendly. We help each other clean off our cars in the winter. We check on each other's mail, pets, plants, and houses while we are on vacation. We help each other carry heavy items into the house. We are known to each other. I personally wouldn't feel safe with neighbors who revolve every day who have no ties to the community that we built. Not to mention I wouldn't want to pay double rent because of all the houses that are taken off the market.

pcrh 12y ago

I don't think Airbnb merely found a loophole in the law, they found a way to connect small operators to large markets. The small B&B market has been around for a long time, but individual hosts, especially if they are providing only 1 or 2 rooms, previously rarely had the ability to market their services in the way they can with Airbnb.

larrys 12y ago
Along the lines of why corporations don't innovate consider that while traditional corporations also use money to fix legal situations or messes they have gotten themselves into, they generally wouldn't enter a market where upfront you know there will be legal problems down the road. It becomes more or less in many situations a non starter.
- bduerst 12y ago
  That's true of most industries - larger corporations are risk averse and let the market acid-test the startups, which are high risk, and then the corporations acquire the startups that pose a threat. It's crazy stupid that Marriot or Hyatt have not tried to acquire Air BnB.

larrys 12y ago

"The traditional taxi service is terrible for drivers" The traditional taxi service, if bad for drivers, is simply because there are enough drivers that will work and be treated like that to make it terrible for the group as a whole. This happens in any employment situation where supply exceeds demand. Because there is a low barrier to entry to be a driver as well as lack of other opportunities for drivers the people in charge get leverage. Likewise "superstar" developers are treated like royalty and well paid in this industry. If all the sudden there were 4 times the superstar developers vying for jobs (assuming demand stays fixed and a superstar is a superstar) all that would go out the window and wages and benefits would almost certainly drop. I'm a pretty good photographer but decided many years ago that since photography had a low barrier to entry, and only a few made it to the top, wages were decreased by competition to make it a non attractive career.

coryrc 12y ago
Except, now Uber/Lyft has vastly increased supply and is better for drivers.
NhanH 12y ago
The difference is that in a lot of cases, there are kind of a "hard cap" for demand that can't be increased easily without a lot of factor (accountant, lawyer comes to mind). However, I believe there are certain professions where if you're only concerned with the superstar level, the sky is the limit (demand-wise): there are no artificial (market) cap on the value you can added to the society. That is until human is immortal, energy is unlimited (to a first approximation), and/ or the Singularity happened.
conanbatt 12y ago
Supply and demand is not the only actor at play in employment. Otherwise, you wouldnt need minimum wage, or laws of any kind to protect employees (or businesses) from the other side. And also, in the particular taxi-driving business, the problem is not supply/demand of drivers, its of city permits to be a taxi driver. Drivers working for Uber/Lyft do not take the same abuse as taxi drivers. The taxi business is a racket, made by people that took that business, got an advantage in that time, and could make laws to their own benefit. Uber found a loophole in those laws, and got to be a winning player in that market. And now, they are going to be one of the actors in redefining the new set of laws regarding this,

rm445 12y ago

Now hold on. Their innovation was monetizing couch-surfing, the 'sharing economy' as applied to places to sleep. Perhaps you can point to someone earlier who broke the ground, but the perception of the world at large is that Airbnb did it. There are plenty of people who wouldn't be violating any rules or laws by being Airbnb hosts. Clearly the service could exist without anyone bypassing laws. You might instead argue that the business model requires laws to be flouted in order to turn a profit, but I don't see how you'd prove it.

baddox 12y ago

> What I dislike the most about Airbnb's whole controversial business model, is how the true innovation they did was bypassing laws. Why do you dislike that? Is it because you think any business which bypasses laws is inherently bad, or is it because you think these particular laws (zoning, hotel regulations, etc.) are themselves valid and should not be broken?

sillysaurus3 12y ago

As property listing sites go, Airbnb did not produce any true innovation. It innovated so much that it enriched my own life quite substantially. I needed what I was only able to find via Airbnb. And those renting their own places needed the money.

gaius 12y ago
And screw the neighbours who never signed up to living in a hotel? All the benefits you and the landlord enjoyed were externalised onto others.

WoodenChair 12y ago

I think you're largely right - but both Uber and Airbnb are therefore testaments to the fact that the laws suck. The arrangements for drivers/riders and renters/rentees seem to be working out well for both sides of the transactions in the vast majority of cases. We should ask ourselves if those regulations should exist in the first place.

vanwesson 12y ago

> the only innovative thing they did was finding a law loophole Don't forget this: http://www.quora.com/Airbnb-Craigslist-Spamming-Controversy http://www.quora.com/Airbnb-Craigslist-Spamming-Controversy

harimau 12y ago
Wasn't aware of this but not surprised. My original comment was going to be to the part of "taking them out of craigslist" since people trying to use craigslist have to sift through their ads clogging up stuff.

hershel 12y ago

I'm all for proper regulation. But on the other hand, recent technological advancements hold potential for huge improvements in almost every important industry(for ex. healthcare), but in many cases, are blocked by regulation. Looking at the amount of value such innovations will create , it sometimes seem greatly unethical not to use that loophole.

secabeen 12y ago

AirBNB did have provide a substantial increase in usability compared to their competitors. When I made my first stay in an AirBNB, I was comparing their offerings to those on VRBO.com, which has been listing rentals of this sort since 1995. AirBNB had a vastly better listing engine compared to the Web 1.0-link system VRBO had at the time. Since then, VRBO has gotten a lot better.

ericabiz 12y ago

"As property listing sites go, Airbnb did not produce any true innovation." Strongly disagree. As an Airbnb host (I rent out my master suite on Airbnb), there simply wasn't a site where I could do that before. Craigslist? Forget it--spam heaven, and no calendar or payment system. And VRBO has always been designed for "vacation homes", not "rent a single bedroom in a house you occupy" (which is why I use Airbnb.) I live in Austin, and Austin has responded to Airbnb by making hosts pay hotel tax, and requiring us to register with the city. While an inconvenience, I'd rather do that than not be able to make extra income renting out the room. I hope San Francisco can do something similar (and I really hope Airbnb builds this into their site so I can stop filing paperwork and mailing paper checks every quarter!)

fred_durst 12y ago
Maybe the reason an alternative didn't exist because others realized it was against a lot of laws, regulations and tax codes? For example, I could start a service that allows people to make food in their house and sell it online. The reality is that in most municipalities you cannot simply cook food in your kitchen and sell it. The difficult part in Airbnb, Uber and my imaginary sharing economy food service is managing to get big enough before authorities catch on. And getting big fast just happens to be something the VC model is very good at. In my opinion it's more an innovation of hyper growth VC funding as a means to out run authorities enforcing regulations, laws and tax codes as opposed to the innovation of something built into the individual service of Airbnb, Uber etc.
- bitwarrior 12y ago
  So, guess what Airbnb is doing next? http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/10/airbnbs-stealth-home-dining-experiment-is-going-to-be-awesome/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/10/airbnbs-stealth-home-dinin...
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    haha, yeah, I was just about to point this out. It's quite a bit easier to die from "disruptive food" than "disruptive lodging" in my personal experience from roughing it once upon a time.

paul 12y ago

I think you could make a similar argument for YouTube, but I personally find all of these services to be tremendously valuable and I'm glad that they are working to evolve the law. Laws are written and interpreted within the context of old, established businesses. Innovation will inevitably produce a certain amount of tension with those old laws. One approach for to dealing with this is to ask permission / change the law first, but that will usually fail because the incumbent businesses generally don't like change (imagine trying to get Hollywood's permission to launch YouTube). The second approach is to move forward within the spirit of the law, deliver genuine value to consumers and society, and then work with legislatures and the courts to develop improved laws and understandings of the law.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago
First, the YouTube comparison is far less appropriate than you suggest. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains a safe harbor that is designed to shield internet service providers from liability associated with copyright infringment provided that they meet certain criteria. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit determined that YouTube was protected by this safe harbor. Second, and more importantly, you seem to neglect the fact that some AirBnB hosts are not just violating laws, but their leases and HOA rules. These are legally-binding contracts between private individuals. AirBnB's most ardent supporters like to focus on zoning and hospitality laws, suggesting that they're antiquated, anti-competitive, etc. Some of these arguments are quite reasonable in my opinion, but what about private contracts? I have yet to see convincing arguments around the issue of hosts who are violating their contracts with their landlords and/or homeowners associations. Most apartment leases have strict terms around subletting and many HOAs have restrictions around property use that would be in conflict with AirBnB-style short term rentals. Even if AirBnB doesn't have a legal obligation to help enforce these, given the number of listings that are ostensibly governed by leases and/or HOA rules, it seems implausible that AirBnB isn't aware that a good number of its hosts are breaking private contracts, potentially exposing those hosts, their neighbors and even their "guests" to a variety of risks. Does AirBnB not have a moral obligation to address this? I'd love to see more AirBnB supporters take on this issue. At least it would be more entertaining and perhaps even more enlightening than the recurrent arguments against zoning and hospitality laws.

raverbashing 12y ago

"is how the true innovation they did was bypassing laws" Hollywood started in the West Coast so they could be far enough from Edison and his patents A lot less MP3 players would be sold if only legal songs were allowed to be loaded But more importantly, a business goes deeper than a nice website. AirBnB built a business using a website, as opposed to several cases where a website is built and the business comes after (not saying it's wrong)

pearkes 12y ago
> Hollywood started in the West Coast so they could be far enough from Edison and his patents If you're curious, as I was, this is a good read: http://www.history.com/news/the-renegade-roots-of-hollywood-studios http://www.history.com/news/the-renegade-roots-of-hollywood-...

simonebrunozzi 12y ago

I couldn't agree more with you. AirBNB, Uber are my top two names. There are others.

jrvarela56 12y ago

Agreed. This does not say as much about Airbnb as it does about how much value is destroyed by outdated, ill-designed regulation.

Mz 12y ago

Eh, laws are written by men. They are not some kind of ethical commandment from god or similar. Lots of laws are even downright unethical and get overturned from time to time. I don't have some strong feeling about what AirBnB has done. I am passingly interested because I previously wanted to be an urban planner, before life got in the way. I find it intriguing that the Internet is reshaping how urban space gets used. We clearly need to create new mental models here. Our old ones are basically dinosaurs that ignore this new reality.

tomphoolery 12y ago

I'm not sure about the comparison with Uber, but I definitely agree with you on how Airbnb's main innovation is finding a loophole around certain laws that are for the benefit of everyone. In Uber's case, however, I believe they were circumventing corrupt laws, put in place to help the medallion holders over anyone else. The taxi dispatch system is antiquated, and if it wasn't Uber or Lyft coming around to change it, it would most certainly have been someone else. I don't believe Uber's only innovation is circumventing laws, because Uber can't be run using a simple spreadsheet. Airbnb can, I know that because it used to be.

brc 12y ago

It's amazing how many business opportunities there are in finding ways to circumvent restrictive regulations. It's almost as if regulations stop people from doing what they want to do and usually only serve a narrow few. Yet year after year, politicians campaign vigorously for re-election by talking about how many new regulations they have written. And anyone who stands up and suggests that maybe a bit of deregulation might be a good idea is branded as someone who is inevitably 'a danger to children/way of life/jobs/etc' So we have a situation where people gladly partake of services which innovate around regulations (usually because it relieves the consumer of the cost of those regulations) yet feel the need to keep returning politicians who promise to create more regulations. The only explanation I have is that most voters think the cost-burden of regulations will always fall on another voter, and that the benefits will flow to them.

nostrademons 12y ago

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, laws are the product of many years of accumulated experience, and wantonly tearing them down means you will probably eventually hit the exact same issues that necessitated the law's formation in the first place. On the other, laws grow by accretion, they exist within a historical context, and they are virtually impossible to get rid of once they have outgrown that historical context. Pretty much the only way to get a law off the books is to intentionally break it and then build enough popular support during the ensuing test case that you can either get a court to strike it down or a lawmaker to introduce a bill to repeal it. So people who break these laws are sometimes (not always) performing an essential service by forcing society to re-examine the rules it governs itself by and determining whether they still serve the public interest. And you don't know whether they're heroes (think Rosa Parks, the Boston Tea Party, or Sony Betamax) or demons (think Napster or the Unabomber) until public opinion comes down one way or the other. It's also interesting how people's reaction to this seems to illustrate Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Reasoning quite sharply: Stage 1 (avoiding punishment): "AirBnB is fine because it's very unlikely that people will get caught or prosecuted" or "I won't use AirBnB because I'm afraid of getting sued or fined." Stage 2 (self-interest): "AirBnB is a good thing because it lets me rent out a resource I already have and make extra cash." Stage 3 (social approval): "AirBnB is fine because all my friends use it." Stage 4 (law & order): "AirBnB is a plague upon this earth because their business model involves nothing more than systematically breaking laws and profiting from it." Stage 5 (contracts): "People have a right to freely enter into contracts to mutually benefit themselves. AirBnB facilitates these contracts, and therefore is beneficial to society. It is the individual's responsibility to respect contracts they have already entered into with other parties." Stage 6 (justice & universal moral principles): "If I were a host, I would appreciate being able to make extra cash by renting out my place. If I were a guest, I would appreciate the extra housing options. However, if I were a neighbor of a host, I would not appreciate the extra foot traffic and possibilities for damage or altercations. In many cases in today's economy, hosts are strapped for cash, and AirBnB may be their sole source of income. A host's right to make a living and not starve outweighs a neighbor's right to peace and quiet, and so the right choice is to legalize AirBnB but with regulations that can protect the rights of neighbors to the greatest extent possible."

12y ago