
Airbnb faces $400m lost bookings in London crackdown - sperling75
https://www.ft.com/content/3bedf28e-c63d-11e6-8f29-9445cac8966f
======
whazor
Airbnb is supposed to be part of the sharing economy, where normal people can
share their places to earn some extra money. But now it is turning into a
heaven for rentiers to earn money with their redundant properties. Airbnb
should have stopped those bookings themselves, not after being forced by local
authorities.

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jakozaur
Random idea. What if, there was AirBnB equivalent endorsed by local city
letting it control rules.

Currently AirBnB do some arbitrage based on regulations: change residential
zoning to hotel one.

E.g. startup does infrastructure, but let city control what going on in
exchange for enforcing rules. AirBnB seems easy to crack down as almost all
listing are semi-public.

~~~
dogma1138
Then it would never work, ABNB works because it has these margins to play with
- the cost differential between running a business and just subletting a
residential property.

You don't have to pay the premium that comes with regulation, you pay lower
taxes (if at all), you don't have to have special insurance, trained staff,
meet stricter public safety regulation etc.

This is why ABNB works if the property owners on ABNB had to meet the same
standards as a hotel or anything close to that they would be considerably more
expensive than hotels because they don't do that at scale while most hotels
do.

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swisschicken
[https://www.google.ch/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/3bedf28e-c63d...](https://www.google.ch/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/3bedf28e-c63d-11e6-8f29-9445cac8966f?client=safari)

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dandare
This article is not even accessible from google.com :(

~~~
zeroer
It is for me.

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Beltiras
How do paywalled articles get to the frontpage? Is there a prevalence of
ft.com subscribers on HN?

~~~
rspeer
HN puts a convenient, though subtle, "web" link on the comment page that
bypasses the paywall by Googling the title.

~~~
Beltiras
That link doesn't work for me.

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hmoghnie
So apparently I have to subscribe first in order to read the article... NO,
thank you.

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Cypher
Stop posting paywall please. Otherwise its simply an add for a subscription
service.

~~~
grzm
Paying for news is arguably one of the ways to improve news quality, and
quality news is valued by many HN users. The submission includes the source.
If you don't want to visit a paywalled source, HN already provides you with
the information you need to make that decision.

Here's a comment from 'dang (one of the HN mods) on this topic from about a
month ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057425)):

 _Paywalled articles are different. That 's a settled matter on HN. The rule
is that paywalled articles are ok when there's a workaround:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

Yes, the paywalls suck, but it would suck worse to deprive HN of the better
NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, etc., articles._

