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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

To be sure, these aren’t Airbnb’s taxes, any more than Hilton “pays” taxes for its guests’ hotel stays. Rather, the officials sparring with Airbnb want the company to collect and forward the taxes from guests, much as hotels do.

So this is local governments trying to railroad an online information/marketplace/intermediation firm into becoming a tax collector. The local governments can't practically collect the taxes, so they're extra-legally trying to bully AirBNB into doing it.

Business models are changing along with the societal changes in communications technology. Governments are pretending to themselves that this isn't a society-level change they should adapt to. (How would collecting such taxes be much different from collecting sales taxes?)

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So this is local governments trying to railroad an online information/marketplace/intermediation firm into becoming a tax collector.

It's not "railroading", it's called "the regulated collection of reasonable usage fees." It's how cities are run, and have always been run.

If Airbnb doesn't like it -- they don't need to go into the hospitality business in these places.

If Airbnb doesn't like it -- they don't need to go into the hospitality business in these places.

That's a dangerous precedent there. Any company that acts as online information/marketplace/intermediation is automatically "in the business?" That's a dangerous precedent to set. Does that mean that reddit is the defacto author & publisher of everything on reddit? Amazon is culpable as the manufacturer of everything it sells? (Not just Amazon Basics.) Something about that strikes me as not quite right and very dangerous.

> the hospitality business

but they're a technology company!

McDonald's is a real estate company. That doesn't mean they don't sell burgers.

They offer a hotel booking platform. Their value is the network of renters and rooms—the tech stack is fairly trivial by comparison.

> Business models are changing along with the societal changes in communications technology.

No one is entitled to their particular business model; I don't see a reason why a company has to be automatically in the green because someone looked at what they're doing and gave it a name. The changing landscape of communications technologies enables things both good and bad, and it turns out that "burning through truckloads of VC money to get away with breaking laws and dumping externalities on people" is something that's both enabled by new technologies and a huge negative for society.

Sales taxes are collected by the business conducting the transaction. AirBnB is that business. I see nothing unreasonable about requiring them to collect said taxes.

If they were Craigslist, where they were actually just a passthrough for transactions conducted entirely outside their platform, then asking them to collect sales taxes would be unreasonable.

> an online information/marketplace/intermediation firm

Well, there is what airbnb say it is, and what it really is in reality.

In a lot of places airbnb is a way to make big bucks via short term touristic rentals (coupled with no tax) instead of renting to actual people living in the city. This itself has creates many problems for local communities.

I've seen houses with 4-5 airbnb room and professional cleaners etc ... it's an hotel, minus the security, minus the insurances.

> Business models are changing along with the societal changes in communications technology.

The other way to interpret it is: "disrupting tech startups are destroying communities and local businesses, by creating / enabling tentacular monopolies which operate above the law".

How do you explain that airbnb payed less than 100k euros in 2016 in France, its 2nd biggest market at the time. [0]

All these companies are going through seriously sketchy processes to make money [1] [2] [3], they just transfer their costs and responsabilities to foreign countries, local communities or their own employees. These things might fly in the US/UK (and even there people are fighting) but they sure won't fly in a lot of EU countries.

[0] http://www.leparisien.fr/economie/airbnb-n-a-paye-que-92-944...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/we-company-ceo-in-hot-wate...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/19/gig-economy...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46018104

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