4 ms·

These laws and regulations were clearly created before the onset of sharing economy. And then they were useful since they provided important safety guarantees t

by avz 12y ago

These laws and regulations were clearly created before the onset of sharing economy. And then they were useful since they provided important safety guarantees to the customers. However, this problem has now been solved by technical means (peer reviews, various forms of karma or reputation scoring etc). Many people say they feel safer, have more trust in and receive better user experience in new sharing economy services like uber and airbnb compared to traditional services like taxi and b&b. This suggests that the new technical solution has potential to be better than the old legalistic one. Perhaps it's again the time to adjust the laws and regulations to the new situation created by emerging technology. Specifically, licensing and limits on duration or portion of property that can be subleased should be scrapped. When it comes to registration, then assuming the government really needs to know about each property being subleased, services like airbnb could be required to export their own registry for use by the gov't. Compliance with such a law would be trivial from technical perspective (database dump with appropriate projection in some standard format). When it comes to taxes, then of course people renting out using airbnb should pay their dues like anyone who makes a profit or receives an income. If they don't, the standard measures against tax evasion apply.

RBerenguel 12y ago
Do you really think peer reviews and karma scoring are really a solution as soon as there is any money involved?
- avz 12y ago
  I think they work especially well when money is involved. If you make some money from time to time by subletting your property or sharing a ride you have even more incentive to maintain good reputation. This is how I imagine small early human communities worked: based on reputation. The thing is that our brains don't scale and they can't maintain reputation model for all people whom we exchange with in a large city. Services like airbnb and uber externalize the reputation model to a large scalable distributed system. As far as spammers and other abusers are concerned tech community has a long and largely successful history of dealing with them (blocklisting, statistical techniques like bayesian spam filtering, machine learning algorithms etc). Gmail is a very good example of effectiveness of spam-fighting techniques.
  - RBerenguel 12y ago
    Gmail is actually a bad example, since spam is "relatively" easy to detect, but detecting fraudulent reviews or behaviours is far, far more complicated. A better example would be eBay, Etsy and Amazon. And they clearly fight a very hard battle to fend scammers and spammers, where, as far as I know, they are more or less tied.
rmc 12y ago
You think Catalonia didn't have a sharing economy? They were anarchist in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s...
- RBerenguel 12y ago
  Wut? (context: I'm Catalan, and as such have studied history related to that in school/out of school)
Xylakant 12y ago
I hate AirBNB and Uber and the like described as "sharing". As an AirBNB host, I sublet a room. It's a rental agreement, there's nothing fancy or new about it. There's also no notion of sharing. It's money for services, a regular business transaction. Couchsurfing is sharing: I offer space to a guest, for no direct return.
- avz 12y ago
  I don't think "to share" means what you think it means. It means "to use or enjoy something jointly or in turns" (source: http://thefreedictionary.com/share http://thefreedictionary.com/share). This doesn't imply "for free". The name "sharing economy" comes from the fact that the property (flat, room, car etc) being provided for use by the customer (generally) remains in use by the owner (either because it can accommodate more than one person or because the owner uses it only temporarily). Perhaps C2C (customer to customer) would be better though and would fit neatly with other business types already called B2B and B2C. I guess it doesn't have the same marketing flair though.
  - Xylakant 12y ago
    That's what I mean - most resources are shared. Any kind of sublet agreement is shared. A hotel room is shared. A cab is a shared resource. A bus, a subway is shared - much more so than an Uber car. Roads are shared. That's not a new thing and the term "sharing economy" was coined just for the marketing aspect, to make it sound like something nice, to have the connotation of "sharing a meal with friends", of community. It's not. It's a cold-hearted business transaction - there's nothing wrong with business transactions, but please if it's business, just don't try to get emotional on me.
    - avz 12y ago
      > That's what I mean - most resources are shared. Most resources are not shared. In the old economy only special classes of resources designated to provide a service used to be shared, e.g. taxis and hotels. Now thanks to sharing economy we can (in principle) share every private car on the road and every room in every building. > It's a cold-hearted business transaction Most business transactions I did were warm-hearted. It's a different discussion, but I think most people honestly want to provide a good service and make the other person happy. It sounds like you may have encountered real jerks out there. Business does not preclude care, sharing or community.

by avz 12y ago

RBerenguel 12y ago

Do you really think peer reviews and karma scoring are really a solution as soon as there is any money involved?

avz 12y ago
I think they work especially well when money is involved. If you make some money from time to time by subletting your property or sharing a ride you have even more incentive to maintain good reputation. This is how I imagine small early human communities worked: based on reputation. The thing is that our brains don't scale and they can't maintain reputation model for all people whom we exchange with in a large city. Services like airbnb and uber externalize the reputation model to a large scalable distributed system. As far as spammers and other abusers are concerned tech community has a long and largely successful history of dealing with them (blocklisting, statistical techniques like bayesian spam filtering, machine learning algorithms etc). Gmail is a very good example of effectiveness of spam-fighting techniques.
- RBerenguel 12y ago
  Gmail is actually a bad example, since spam is "relatively" easy to detect, but detecting fraudulent reviews or behaviours is far, far more complicated. A better example would be eBay, Etsy and Amazon. And they clearly fight a very hard battle to fend scammers and spammers, where, as far as I know, they are more or less tied.

rmc 12y ago

You think Catalonia didn't have a sharing economy? They were anarchist in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s...

RBerenguel 12y ago
Wut? (context: I'm Catalan, and as such have studied history related to that in school/out of school)

Xylakant 12y ago

I hate AirBNB and Uber and the like described as "sharing". As an AirBNB host, I sublet a room. It's a rental agreement, there's nothing fancy or new about it. There's also no notion of sharing. It's money for services, a regular business transaction. Couchsurfing is sharing: I offer space to a guest, for no direct return.

avz 12y ago
I don't think "to share" means what you think it means. It means "to use or enjoy something jointly or in turns" (source: http://thefreedictionary.com/share http://thefreedictionary.com/share). This doesn't imply "for free". The name "sharing economy" comes from the fact that the property (flat, room, car etc) being provided for use by the customer (generally) remains in use by the owner (either because it can accommodate more than one person or because the owner uses it only temporarily). Perhaps C2C (customer to customer) would be better though and would fit neatly with other business types already called B2B and B2C. I guess it doesn't have the same marketing flair though.
- Xylakant 12y ago
  That's what I mean - most resources are shared. Any kind of sublet agreement is shared. A hotel room is shared. A cab is a shared resource. A bus, a subway is shared - much more so than an Uber car. Roads are shared. That's not a new thing and the term "sharing economy" was coined just for the marketing aspect, to make it sound like something nice, to have the connotation of "sharing a meal with friends", of community. It's not. It's a cold-hearted business transaction - there's nothing wrong with business transactions, but please if it's business, just don't try to get emotional on me.
  - avz 12y ago
    > That's what I mean - most resources are shared. Most resources are not shared. In the old economy only special classes of resources designated to provide a service used to be shared, e.g. taxis and hotels. Now thanks to sharing economy we can (in principle) share every private car on the road and every room in every building. > It's a cold-hearted business transaction Most business transactions I did were warm-hearted. It's a different discussion, but I think most people honestly want to provide a good service and make the other person happy. It sounds like you may have encountered real jerks out there. Business does not preclude care, sharing or community.