Well seeing as you'd be obligated to collect things like hotel occupancy taxes in most cities and states, and all sorts of consumer protection laws apply to hotels, the reasonable assumption is licensing is required. At the minimum, you need a business licence.
To me the issue is scale. Just like people can hold garage sales or lemonade stand w/o a license vs running a bar.
By same token - I don't mind someone renting out AN apartment. If the issue is tax - Airbnb can simply collect it on behalf of the renter. As far as consumer protection - the guest deals with AirBnB and not an individual host.
If license was obtained by simply filling out a web form and paying a fee - I'd be all for it. But the way things are now, the whole issue of licensing is about protecting the hotel industry.
If you live across the street from me and have a garage sale every day of the week, we're going to have a problem. Your casual dismissal of licensing and oversight, as merely protections for the entrenched, overlooks the fact that there is more than one interested party here.
I have to agree with the upstream commenter's general sentiment that this idea gets all the support here because it lends itself to an easy narrative of armchair libertarianism #winning
Yeah, that's the difference for me also. If my neighbor rents out a couch or spare room on AirBnB a few times a year, no problem. If he is running it as a 365-day-a-year hotel, much more of a problem.
What if he/she dated and brought home 365 people a year? You may not like it .. but it is really your business what someone does in the privacy of their own home?
The moment the person operates it as a hotel, the person has turned it into a business and semi-public space and regulation does not affect the privacy of the owner. In the dating scenario, on the other hand, it would.
There's a lot of behaviour that is undesirable to neighbours because it directly and negatively affect our lives, that we are still willing to accept (if possibly grudgingly) if doing anything about it would mean interfering in someones private life.
Ok, so the issue is not really licensing, if we get honest.
Instead you don't want your next door neighbor to rent out his apartment on a full-time basis and see requirement to obtain a license as a measure that would prevent that from happening.
I do agree it's a valid concern - but I'm not really sure why we need extra laws for this. The guests are either doing something illegal or they are not - in which case, I don't see any problem.
There's something analogous to the weak anthropic principle here in that we mostly live in places where the problems that come with unlicensed hotels have been stomped out, sometimes for generations, largely through successful regulation.
