Airbnb, the San Franciscan home-sharing startup, will begin collecting hotel taxes in its home city, ending a two-year long fight against the practice.

The move makes San Francisco the second city where Airbnb will collect local taxes, following its agreement to do the same in Portland, Oregon last week. It has offered to do the same in New York.

Airbnb lets homeowners rent out their houses to guests for short-term stays. The firm boasts customers in 192 countries, and booked 6 million guests in 2013. But as an exemplar of the "sharing economy", the site takes a backseat to relations between hosts and guests, arguing that its responsibility extends no further than linking the two.

As a result, the decision to start collecting taxes is an about-face, as it had previously argued that it was the hosts' responsibility to comply with any local regulations and taxes.

'Shared city'



Airbnb is calling this new government-friendly approach the "shared city" initiative. Writing on Medium, CEO Brian Chesky said: "Shared city is our initiative to help civic leaders and our community create more shareable, more livable cities through relevant, concrete actions and partnerships."

Chesky said: "We will make it easy for Portland hosts to donate the money they earn from Airbnb to a local cause, and we will match those donations as a percentage of our fees… We’re offering to cut red tape and to collect and remit taxes to the city of Portland on behalf of our hosts. This is new for us, and if it works well for our community and cities, we may replicate this project in other US cities."

AirBnB's previous anti-tax stance has earned it the enmity of local government worldwide. In New York, for example, officials ruled that an Airbnb host was running an "illegal hotel", and fined him $2,400, while Berlin has begun to levy steep fines on anyone who rents their home out for short periods.

In most cities, Airbnb's stance remains that it cannot vet individual hosts for compliance with taxation regulations, but Portland and San Francisco represent a new frontier for the company. Even in New York, the site of the most pitched battles with government, it is now offering to collect and distribute taxes worth $21m directly from its hosts.

The battle over taxing Airbnb hosts is just one front of a wider war between startups which set out to "disrupt" existing industries, and governments which struggle to regulate the new firms according to rules set up for an earlier age. Tesla Motors, for example, has recently fallen foul of a regulation in New Jersey which requires all cars to be sold through registered dealers, threatening the electric car company's direct sales model.

But some worry that the rules being flouted remain valuable even in a connected world. Another startup firm, Uber, provides a minicab-like service to users of its smartphone apps (although, as with Airbnb, Uber maintains it only links riders with drivers). It has faced criticism from the American Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association for providing insufficient insurance. "They don't carry commercial insurance, which protects the passenger and the driver at any point," said the group's representative David Sutton on Wednesday.

AirBnB's new friendliness to regulators could be useful if it were to seek a stock market flotation, which would follow reported attempts to raise funding at a valuation of $10bn. "Whether that valuation… is reasonable can be debated," argues Carmel Deamicis, a reporter for industry magazine PandoDaily, "but there’s one thing that’s crystal clear: Airbnb can’t grow into that massive valuation by being a hospitality alternative. It has to become as mainstream as The Hilton."

• Airbnb close to securing private cash that would value firm at $10bn