It’s a now-common story in New York: A new tech-based company sets up business — only to run afoul of regulations.
We’ve seen it with taxi-hailing apps like Uber. We may be seeing it now with the room-sharing service Airbnb, which has drawn the attention of state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who claims the service is illegally subletting and creating underground hotels. On Tuesday, Airbnb went to court to block a Schneiderman subpoena of its records, even as it canceled 2,000 suspicious listings one day before.
On top of that, The Post has reported Airbnb users returning home to find their apartments had been used in their absence by hookers and other unsavory characters.
There are many competing interests at work here, with varying degrees of legitimacy. Our take is this: A modern and dynamic city such as New York ought to be working to accommodate popular new technologies, much as the recording industry was once forced to accommodate consumers demanding the right to download individual songs.
Hotels are right to resent a competitor who doesn’t pay taxes — but wrong if they want to use regulation to eliminate competition. Taxes in any case are relatively easier to handle, and Airbnb says it’s willing to collect them. As for the law, if it’s bad or outdated, we should change it, not flout it.
The stickier point is the communal one: People have a right to know that the Airbnb renters next door are legit. There’s a future for Airbnb in New York — but if it is to sell itself to the community, it plainly needs a vetting system that inspires far more confidence than the one it has.