Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments
Any time anyone says they &quot;want to pay taxes&quot;, you know they are lying.  No one anywhere <i>wants</i> to pay - no one looks forward to it.<p>Not that I&#x27;m a fan of big government, but I don&#x27;t understand why, if they really are just ignoring the law in most jurisdictions (which they are), none of these states just issue arrest warrants for the people in charge of these decisions?  Why isn&#x27;t there an outstanding warrant for the CEO of AirBnB from any one of the 50 US states for flagrant tax evasion?  Or even going further to actually request the state where that CEO is present in to be arrested and extradited to that state?  The CEO can&#x27;t possibly claim they didn&#x27;t know this was an issue.  So then the battle will be forced in court for them to prove that they weren&#x27;t responsible for collecting the tax <i>and</i> that if instead the property owners were in fact responsible, that AirBnB wasn&#x27;t guilty of facilitating criminal tax evasion.<p>I&#x27;m sick and tired of these Silicon Valley companies deciding that their big idea is to decentralize so that they can ignore regulations and licensing requirements by saying &quot;we&#x27;re just a platform, the users need to do that&quot;.  Same bullshit with Uber claiming their drivers aren&#x27;t employees but rather &quot;independent contractors&quot;, even though Uber sets all the rules, prices, etc.  I&#x27;ve never heard of an independent contractor who can&#x27;t determine how much they charge.<p>Similarly, these AirBnB places aren&#x27;t legally zoned for the activity they are engaging in, nor are virtually any of the property owners licensed to do business as a lodging facility or registered and authorized to collect the occupancy taxes.  AirBnB knows this and the grand scale of the illegal activity, at bare minimum, proves that the purpose of the platform is to circumvent the laws&#x2F;regulations but not with an actual loophole, just by ignoring them and hoping they can grow fast enough so that they aren&#x27;t just shut down hard.