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.
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.
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):
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/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.
