[ryguytilidie]

"I know that a lot of people on this site think that if you add the words 'on the internet' you should be exempt from all regulation and taxation, but that's just not how the world works."

Yeah dude, you're right, it's this point you made up that no one is upset about that people are ACTUALLY upset about...?

Oh, I see, because your experience has been negative you should definitely make up a strawman and beat it to death for no good reason. We all know that projecting views on everyone on an entire site is a super healthy and productive way to make a point.

[potatolicious]

Don't speak for me.

I'm upset about the lack of taxation and regulation. I care about it in the AirBnb context, I also care about it in the Lyft and Sidecar context. These are all cases where we have a massive provisioning of services, in a context where caveat emptor is not actually practical, in industries where vendor-side abuse has been historically endemic.

We regulated the slum-hotels of the 20s and 30s out of existence. We regulated gypsy cabs (mostly) out of existence. I personally still recall living in a time where unregulated cabs would hold passengers for ransom by driving them to the middle of nowhere. Thankfully I no longer live in such a time or place.

I'm concerned that in our obsession with "move fast and break things" we're doing a lot of the latter. Some of these regulations are powered by vested interests. Some of it is historical and represent hard-learned lessons. The tech industry's collective attitude towards them seems to be "all laws are archaic and outdated, ignore all laws that don't benefit us". I for one don't believe in this for one second.

[jellicle]

The tech industry is driven by 20-year-olds who have zero education or practical experience to understand why a lot of things are the way they are.

It turns out there are real reasons why hotels are regulated, why banking is regulated, why cabs are regulated, why meat-packing is regulated (still waiting for a internet-based meat-packing startup - Mechanical Turk meets Tyson Foods! Just slice the side of beef we send you, in your kitchen, then pack it back into the cooler with the pre-addressed label...), and so on.

The reason always is: because the business has been PROVEN TO FUCK PEOPLE OVER WHEN UNREGULATED.

(Longer answer: there's a systemic power problem between the provider and user of these businesses. Tourists have no power to avoid being fucked over, for example. Meat with E. Coli looks the same as meat without.)

But the 20-year-olds have grown up in a world where the business does not fuck people over (because it is regulated) and so they do not see any reason why it might require regulation.

And the VCs, the only adults in the equation, don't act the part of grownups because they're hoping the regulators are slow enough for a lot of profits to be extracted before shutdown occurs.