Former Hotel Exec Gets Elected To Congress, Decides First Order Of Business Is To Destroy Airbnb

from the really,-now? dept

Ed Case represents Hawaii's 1st district in Congress. He was just elected in 2018, though he actually was in Congress once before, when he represented Hawaii's 2nd district from 2002 to 2007. He left Congress last time to run for the Senate, but that flopped. And he lost another attempt at rejoining Congress in 2010. In 2013 he announced that he was joining a Hawaii-based hotel operator, Outrigger Enterprises Group, as Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer. At the time, he said that doing so "likely ends any further political career." In 2016, he joined the board of directors of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a large hotel trade group. AHLA has been among the leading hotel industry groups pushing to kill Airbnb. The hotel industry, as a whole, seems to have spent much of the last decade looking for any possible way to attack and kill Airbnb rather than improve its own products.

And now Case is back in Congress -- and apparently an early order of business is to continue to push for AHLA and his former employer's goals. As sent to me by a few people, Case has sent a letter around to his House colleagues, asking them to support and cosponsor a new bill that he has not yet released, that would strip Section 230 protections from any short-term rental platform like Airbnb:

Dear Colleague: Is your community one of a multitude throughout our country suffering from the negative effects of illegal vacation rentals? Effects that include unavailability of affordable housing, avoidance of standard consumer protections and loss of state and local government revenue? If so, please join me as an original cosponsor of the Protecting Local Authority and Neighborhoods (PLAN) Act. This bill would end abusive litigation by internet-based short-term rental platforms attempting to avoid accountability for profiting from illegal rentals and strike down local regulations aimed at curbing this illegal activity and its widespread negative impacts. Over the past decade-plus, the short-term vacation rental industry has exploded through the internet-based marketing platforms of Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO, Flipkey and others. While some communities welcome this activity, which is largely conducted in residential neighborhoods, many others are concerned with several negative consequences. These include the loss of affordable housing as residential units are converted to transient accommodations for tourists, and the failure of many unit owners and rental operators to comply with basic consumer safety, public accommodations and tax requirements as must the legal lodging industry. A survey of related news also makes clear that commercial lodging activity in otherwise residential neighborhoods gives rise to serious community safety and disruption issues. As a result, from Hawai‘i to Maine state and local governments are updating their land use laws to put parameters around short-term rental activity, tailored to reflect local concerns and as always has been the case with land use regulation. However, the short-term rental online platforms have repeatedly gone to court to strike down these laws, claiming Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) preempts local efforts to stop the listing and booking of illegal rentals by these platforms. They have sued cities large and small – including New York City, Boston, Miami, Anaheim, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Chicago, Miami Beach, Palm Beach and Santa Monica – to protect a business model they know relies in large part on concealing the illegal activity of their third-party operators. The PLAN Act would amend CDA 230 to make clear the statute does not shield platforms when they facilitate illegal rental bookings. Platforms would also be accountable if they fail to stop booking rentals after receiving notice from a private property owner that short-term rentals are prohibited at that location. This is a narrow, targeted change to the statute to ensure short-term rental companies and internet platforms comply with state and local planning, zoning, rental, labor and tax laws and end their abusive stretching of CDA 230’s original intent. State attorneys general, mayors, and local officials have called for similar updates to CDA 230 to enable them to uphold their local laws and protect citizens living and working in their communities.

This is yet another attack on Section 230. As we've discussed in the past, Section 230 absolutely should protect these businesses -- even as the 9th Circuit has ruled the other way -- because it's a classic Section 230 issue, in which city governments are holding platforms liable for the speech of their users. If cities want to limit small, local businesses and block short-term rentals, that's their business -- but they shouldn't get to leverage sites like Airbnb to be their enforcers (which is all these laws really do).

But it's seems highly questionable for Case to go from being an exec at a hotel company and a board member of the big hotel trade group (that has long attacked Airbnb and similar sites) to wasting little time in Congress to push for a law that directly helps his former employers. I'm sure he truly believes that this is the right thing to do, but it certainly stinks of the kind of "soft corruption" that makes people not trust their government at all. It's not illegal, but it sure looks sketchy. Case has done other good things in Congress, including trying to get the intelligence community to pay attention to basic civil liberties (which sure would be nice). But this new plan to modify Section 230 to help his former colleagues is not that.

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Filed Under: cda 230, congress, ed case, hawaii, hotels, section 230, short term rentals, vacation rentals

Companies: ahla, airbnb, outrigger