"Catalonia’s regional government said Tuesday that Airbnb is in “serious” breach of regional law and that it has ordered the company to pay €30,000 ($41,000) in fines within the month or begin adhering to Catalan law."

I'm guessing they meant to write "and begin adhering to the law" but so often we hear that you can either follow the law or bribe the officials to look the other way, it reads a bit like the latter :-). I'm curious what the folks in Spain think of this, is AirBnB a good thing or a bad thing?

Not only that, but it's hard to know if AirBnb hosts are declaring their taxes properly (AirBnb could enforce this, though.)

As a Spaniard, I like seeing some disruption in areas that need it, and promoting leasing/rentings definitely needs it. But as a freelancer who pays quite a lot in taxes, it boils my blood that so many people (including most government officials, granted) try to game the system.

As for the quote, I can't find it anywhere in local sources, neither did I hear it yesterday when the officials appeared on news. So, it's probably a writer error, meant to be and.

Does a substantial percentage of their advertisers break the law by not having the appropriate licenses required in their countries? If no, then they shouldn't be receiving any ultimatums.

(the answer to that question, by the way, is "no" for most of these sites, as most of them are simply affiliates / marketing partners for a handful of companies that have, decades of history of dealing with the regulations properly when representing the property owners; I'm sure there are exceptions here and there, especially for smaller/newer operators)

You may not see this as "driven by any sort of guiding principle other than protectionist aversion", but a lot of others see this as driven by the respective organs duty to uphold various consumer protection laws.

I don't know the details of it, but at a basic level, only being allowed to rent places that have had some kind of safety inspection doesn't seem that ludicrous to me.

It looks like the kind of nonsense governments use when they want to bar you from some freedom isn't it? They put a discouraging administrative burden on you.

When you rent it there are minimum standards, renters are often in a weak position to get things fixed and for short term rents the renter is arriving blind with possibly no opportunity to change plans if they recognise there are safety issues even if they have the skills to identify them.

Of course, that's if the law was actually intended to protect the renters.

When people are OK to break the law, they do it big time usually, so adding laws puts the burden on honest people more than dishonest ones...

In France, when you want to lend your house, you must have it tested for energetic efficiency. Mine (which I rent) was rated "A", which means best efficiency... Except I have all heaters on max setting in the winter. The administrative burden and high cost is on all of us, with no guarantee, plus you don't sue for higher than expected heating costs.

Also the failure to have the inspection might be easier to prosecute and show was deliberate than particular safety breaches.

As for non-obvious safety issues I'm willing to increase my chances of injury or death by 0.0001% or whatever by visiting some guy's house without a government inspection and I think most people would agree. Staying at an AirBnB is probably the least dangerous part of any given trip.

I don't see the point of mentioning the "kids" part in your message. I can live in my house, I can keep it incredibly unsafe at that, and raise kids (because they are a kind of legal extension of my person, up until social care is aware of it.) But as soon as you are letting other people in, safety measures improve the quality for all involved. I'd rather visit a city where I knew places I'm likely to stay are safe and checked.

As a short term renter, you will be agreeing sight unseen to live there for a period of time, and will have no opportunity to fix it during your stay. You have absolutely no control over the safety of the property, and are relying on some third party to provide you with a level of comfort about it.

I've used airbnb in many European cities where the rentals are invariably converted apartments in dense buildings (i.e. 30-200 apartments) in a residential neighbourhood. It's completely different to letting out a farm house on an estate in the middle of no where. Respect for your neighbours (tenant and owner alike) in such communities is paramount.

You don't need to rely on nonsense like "natural rights" to oppose the government-granted licensing system.

(You should also not assume I support full property rights)

If I were to, for example, start a 24/7 brothel in my terraced suburban house, complete with front garden strip show set to loud music and light show, it would have tremendous negative effects on my neighbours.

You don't need the consent of the community to declare land as your own. There are other moral systems and ideas to the ones you specify. Just putting it out there, you know.

How exactly do you propose land registration would work, when it's not backed up by a government guarantee?

Spain is the 2rd receptive tourist destination for the world (1st is US) (uwto.org)

Neighbors horror stories like the ones we´ve been seeing in NY, don´t seem to be as big a factor in this. Still it happens, mainly in the big cities like Barcelona and Madrid, were some flat owners are having problems with the guests of their neighbors. But I´m not aware that the neighbors are too vocal (I´ll gladly be corrected about this).

The Hotel lobby is seeing how a big chunk of their business is going to the share economy and they are afraid.

In Mallorca where I live, most AirBnB offerings are mostly for summer apartments and homes (not at the city), so there is little problem with neighbors (who mostly want to do the same). People of course see AirBnB as a way to keep low the costs of owning a summer apartment (renting the weeks they are not going to use it). This is specially interesting to those who are trapped on high Mortgages from the bubble, as it´s providing them another income source. People who inherited or bought before 2004 are seeing mostly profits, and if you are lucky (and dedicated) you are able to make money of it.

So far the legal status in Mallorca is good, as you can register your apartment for season renting only paying a yearly fare per bed to be rented. But they are certainly receiving heat by the lobbys and this could change any moment.

I guess that the best move by AirBnB is to start selling this local governments the advantages of AirBnB:

-to improve the usage of the empty apartment stock (that eventually increases the plummeted property prices) -Putting money on the hands of the people who more needs it. -Not a killing competitor to hotels, while certain % of clients will move to AirBnB, not all people wants to go to apartments (even less if they are privately owned), for they vacations. It´s a similar concept to the low cost companies, they increase the total traffic, and the total business for the area, it´s not only the same passengers traveling cheaper.

Don´t need to be all local government, just 2 or 3 of the most touristic ones like Baleares, Canarias, Valencia, Cataluña. Once one starts making AirBnB friendly regulations (and selling them as an advantage for the government itself), most of the rest will follow.

Needing some kind of permit to do whatever I please with my property, if it doesn't create problems to anybody else, is insane.

If you don't like the law that gives you no permission to walk around it.

Why do you think collecting taxes is what everyone considers a just thing to do?

Why do you think fairness is when hotels can charge visitors twice as much and provide twice as shittier service?

Why do you think laws cannot be broken, if unjust? Many people smoke weed which is illegal in many countries. Do you consider those people to be criminals? Would you look them in the eye and tell them to go vote harder next time and then send them to jail?

Not my own security, but the security of the person who pays for the room.

> Why do you think collecting taxes is what everyone considers a just thing to do?

I don't care about what people thinks is just or not. Taxes must be paid, because otherwise there would be no public services, such as healthcare or education. We rely on them.

> Why do you think fairness is when hotels can charge visitors twice as much and provide twice as shittier service?

You are free to open a hotel which follows the law but has lower prices.

> Why do you think laws cannot be broken, if unjust? Many people smoke weed which is illegal in many countries. Do you consider those people to be criminals? Would you look them in the eye and tell them to go vote harder next time and then send them to jail?

A very weird comparison you're pulling here. I won't even bother to respond to this...

Can a person decide for himself whether to stay with a government licenced business like a hotel or with someone who wants to rent him a room without any special permits from the government? Why are you deciding for that other person what is safe or not?

>I don't care about what people thinks is just or not. Taxes must be paid, because otherwise there would be no public services, such as healthcare or education. We rely on them.

And roads. You forgot, no one but government bureaucrats can build roads.

So, you don't care for what other people think is just, but you're absolutely okay with forcing your perceived conception of justice upon them by saying "it's unfair to hotels"? What makes you think your sense of fairness is better?

>You are free to open a hotel which follows the law but has lower prices

This is impossible because the permits I'd have to obtain and rules I'd have to comply with would raise prices.

>A very weird comparison you're pulling here. I won't even bother to respond to this...

Not weird at all. You said you can't go breaking a law if you simply disagree with it. I gave you an example of a law that many people break and asked you whether you would send them to jail for breaking it. If you stand by your principle, you'd have to do it.

No. By that way of thinking, people should be free not to wear a seat belt or a helmet when driving, and that's wrong. (Now that we're talking about weird analogies...)

> And roads. You forgot, no one but government bureaucrats can build roads.

Not here at least. Private companies can build roads and make you pay a fee for using them. (There's always a free alternative, though.)

> So, you don't care for what other people think is just, but you're absolutely okay with forcing your perceived conception of justice upon them by saying "it's unfair to hotels"? What makes you think your sense of fairness is better?

I don't care about hotels, but this is not the jungle -- you need a set of permits and pay your taxes, and not having/paying them would be unfair competition, which is not allowed.

> This is impossible because the permits I'd have to obtain and rules I'd have to comply with would raise prices.

Then go to another country. We need money from taxes to maintain our welfare state.

> Not weird at all. You said you can't go breaking a law if you simply disagree with it. I gave you an example of a law that many people break and asked you whether you would send them to jail for breaking it. If you stand by your principle, you'd have to do it.

Who's going to go to jail for smoking pot? At least not here. You can't sell it though, because 1) you'd pay no taxes (it's not regulated) and 2) there are diseases related to it, and public healthcare must pay for them.

Exactly, they should be free to do that. How does not wearing a helmet or a seatbelt hurts anyone else but them? Why can't they make this decision? Wearing a seatbelt or a helmet is not going to help the other side involved in the accident.

>Then go to another country. We need money from taxes to maintain our welfare state.

Precisely what is going to happen. Also, you need tax money, but you say "go to some other place to do your business"? Really? Do you understand logic?

>Who's going to go to jail for smoking pot? At least not here. Are you saying if I openly go smoke a joint outside in your country, cops will just pass by and not pay any attention to me?

Anyway, I get your point and, as you can imagine, I disagree completely.

First, nobody wants to see people dying. If you want to see the cold side of it, a lot of people fall in depressions due to traffic accidents, which in turn means productivity lowers. And remember: public healthcare must pay for the hospital, the medics, and if the accident makes you unable to work, you'll get a life-time pension, which the country must pay for as well.

> Precisely what is going to happen. Anyway, I get your point and, as you can imagine, I disagree completely.

I don't care about liberalism, as long as it's out of my country. I respect your point of view, though. There are countries where liberalism is working, so I don't think it's that bad. I just don't want it to be here. :)

I see you structured this as an ownership issue. The issue is that certain things leak outside of what one owns. This includes sound, light, odor, and access to shared space. How are these resolved? Combat, private courts (as, for example, in medieval Iceland), public courts (civil in this case), and various other dispute resolution systems exist.

Nearly all of them, including duels, depend on a system of laws. Take the Icelandic Commonwealth as an example of a society with no government, and where everything was privately owned. Even then, there was a set of laws, and the role of the lögsögumaðr was to act as counselor and to recite the laws at the Alþingi so that everyone would know what they are. If there was a serious problem that couldn't be resolved locally, it was handled by the Alþingi, as many of the sagas describe.

Also, as DanBC is part of society, your first phrase is odd - it's shifting the burden within society not to society, and shifting it to a dispute resolution system which has been developed to handle precisely these issues. Similarly, I've shifted my water acquisition burden nearly completely to society.

The chances of someone stopping renting their place out because a neighbor asks for it are ZERO. Unless you show up with a led pipe and a couple of friends.

edit Downvote all you want, but if you unglue yourselves from the monitors and indeed try and talk to a neighbor who has already resolved to rent his place out, you will quickly realize that such decisions are not made lightly and by the time you show up to change your mind, it's already too late.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, it doesn't. Quite to the contrary, good relations foster business transactions - nobody wants to do business with jerks. But still, business is first and foremost an exchange: I do something for you, you do something in return. If we both get along, that's even better and if I can give you something for free (that is, not extract the maximum value from that transaction), that's nice and I'm sure you'd probably remember me when you can give. Still, the primary reason for a business transaction is business, not benevolence. That's charity then. It's dangerous to pretend otherwise.

The novelty is increased utilization through sharing of what used to be exclusive.

Private property has a downside: it generally stands unused or underused when owner isn't using it or is only using it partially or temporarily. Sharing economy fixes this problem and allows society to extract value from the underutilized resources we already have. This increases availability and reduces prices of the services included in the sharing economy.

Sublet agreements existed for centuries before AirBNB came along. I have lived in sublets before people took the internet for something serious. The novelty is that AirBNB managed to provide a streamlined user experience and achieved a critical mass. The novelty about Uber is that is managed to create a second taxi market in the US. That's a feat in itself, but that's not a "sharing economy". It's certainly an efficiency gain, but hey - efficiency gains are abundant in all parts of the economy, that's nothing new.

The core innovation of sharing economy is scaling up trust networks people traditionally relied on to mitigate risk involved in sharing transactions. Since the risk of this type of business is high, it used to be done only on a longer term basis, among friends and family and by people who really needed the money and so just had to put up with the risk. This meant that in the old economy sharing transactions were few and far between. Scaling up the trust networks means that they can now become commonplace.

Tragedy of the commons... This is why we can't have nice things.