Uber's problems are not Airbnb's problems, and I find this continued trend of always mentioning the two in the same breath when it comes to regulation quite baffling.<p>Opposition to Uber is a clear case of regulatory capture. Every negative outcome that regulation is meant to mitigate (accountability, safety, reliability, discrimination, non-predatory pricing) is <i>better served</i> by Uber (and two-factor location tracking) than traditional cabs. I have not heard anybody raise compelling objections to Uber's model based on objective harm to consumers or market non-participants (negative externalities).<p>Airbnb's model, on the other hand, is rife with negative externalities. The most significant of these are the degradation of communities that were never meant to accommodate de facto hotels (noise, parking, transient traffic), and the drying up of affordable housing stock for people who actually intend to live in the homes they purchase.
This is a nonstarter for Airbnb because if they gave the type of data suggested here you'd be able to extremely easily analyze it and find all the places where illegal sublets were happening, which is a major part of their business. There is no way around Airbnb's problems without changing zoning legislation.
This essay has some interesting analysis contrasting the differences between the model of licensing/guild vs crowdsourced reviews.<p>However, analyzing that aspect misses the point.<p>The heated issues around Uber is <i>economics</i> and how the pieces of the pie are cut up. Explaining how new technologies allow a different trust model to emerge is <i>irrelevant to the French taxi driver throwing bricks at Uber cars</i> or <i>DiBlasio's proposed cap to curb congestion</i>.<p>In other words, this essay is more relevant to a <i>potential passenger</i> of Uber who wonders how he/she can <i>trust</i> a car that doesn't have a government medallion.<p>One needs to write a totally different type of essay to appeal to angry taxi drivers and angry politicians.
I'm a little confused here. The article says Uber and Airbnb are quite effectively regulating themselves, and never bothers explaining why they're a problem.
Ahh, yes, the Randian ideology of the self-regulating data-driven, no-bullshit enterprise, because governments are Big and Bad and will stifle the hardworking man in their attempts to do right for society.
I can see why no one would like this sort of regulatory scheme as it would put everyone's relevant data in the open. Everyone would be able to look at it whether you're the affected company or not. Effectively, it gives more data to competitors to figure out where a market is being underserved or underdeveloped which would mean existing firms would have to deal with potential losses of economic profit. Honestly, I prefer this approach despite being an anti-capitalist. This approach could be part of the solution to cure the inequities of capitalism.
> 2) In exchange for that freedom to operate, companies will need to share data with regulators — un-massaged, and in real time, just like their users do with them. AND, will need to accept that that data may result in forms of accountability. Just like user data informs accountability measures within their platforms:<p>The problem with this is it imagines a world where the regulators don't need to perform any kind of audit/inspection.<p>The reality is, companies cut corners which will cause bugs and "bugs" in the data transfer process. The only way for a regulator to discover these issues is....to do what they do now.<p>It also ignores the fact that companies like Amazon <i>explicitly tell people who interact with the reporting portion of their MWS business that they cannot report information in real time</i>. And I'm pretty sure that is due to costs. This regulatory model would likely increase compliance costs for businesses with delayed reporting mechanisms because they don't need to guarantee processing in real time. The same is true of numerous companies I deal with at #DayJob. There are numerous remote sites with low bandwidth connections including <i>in other countries</i> that regularly have replication delays for reporting purposes.<p>There are soooooo many holes that are going to require the "expensive" part of regulation (boots on the ground to inspect/examine) to continue to operate the "old" way anyway.
Can we stop referring to business models which choose to simply skirt or ignore the law as "innovation"? I'm pretty sure the Mafia has been doing that for decades.
Polymet is about to get permission to open one of the first copper sulfide mines in Minnesota. This mine will be directly over the Superior Watershed, one of the largest fresh water aquifers in the world.<p>We have <i>plenty</i> of data about how destructive copper sulfide mining is yet it looks like it will get rammed through. So the idea that "asking permission" is a thing, well, I'm not sure it really is anymore.
The solution seems to gloss over the fact that these businesses (with their relaxed licensing requirements and greater freedom to operate) would have to build a real-time government data sharing system before they could operate. Sounds almost like a way to keep smaller competitors out of the market via onerous regulatory requirements, almost the opposite of the stated goal.
One step towards the proposed idea would be for a tech-savvy government to build a platform and offer APIs. Just imagine: an API to file your tax return, to vote, to register marriage, to open a business, to register a child, to get government statistics generated from all this data and of course an API to authenticate.
"I am not sure there’s a near term alternative to this process — new ways of doing things will never see the light of day if step 1 is always “ask permission”. The answer will nearly always be no, and new ideas won’t have a chance to prove themselves."<p>Usually the regulations are in place for a reason. Someone has already tried those things. Maybe not "on the internet" or "with an app", but they've been done. Trying to skirt lodging and rental regulation by using your apartments as hotel rooms, bypassing both hotel taxes and rent control is not new.
This doesn't actually solve the problems.<p>Businesses have used real-time data for decades to optimize their processes, and that's all we're seeing referenced in this post. Setting aside the question of whether Uber drivers are "employees," they are certainly inside the business model, and so is the data about their performance.<p>But the reasons we have regulations is that business optimizations can be counter to social goals. And knowing about a bad thing doesn't allow one to go back in time and fix it.
This article makes an assumption that regulation is a tool used to protect consumers. While the rhetoric may be to make it sound that way, most regulation exists to protect incumbents who stand to lose money. This is just how governments have always worked; which is why driving accountability in government is so hard.