In a new chapter of what is starting to seem like a never-ending legal battle, New York is asking Airbnb to hand over data on all 15,000 city hosts registered on the website, as part of an investigation into illegal hotels in New York City.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent a subpoena to the startup requesting it to hand over data on all its New York City users, as first reported by the New York Daily News.
See also: Airbnb Users Already Cashing in on the Super Bowl
Nick Papas, an Airbnb spokesperson, confirmed to Mashable that the company has received a subpoena for "detailed data on our hosts," he wrote in an email. But he also denied that there is a Monday deadline to turn over the data, as the Daily News reported. Papas also declined to answer other questions and provide more details on the scope of the subpoena.
But a person familiar with the investigation told Mashable that the subpoena is part of a month-long investigation in response to concerns from legislators and housing advocates. According to the source, the subpoena compels Airbnb "to provide information about their users’ compliance with various state laws."
"Specifically, we are looking for information about property managers or brokers who are skirting the law by renting multiple units, or people who rent their primary unit for large amounts of time throughout the year," the source said. "We aren’t targeting the casual user who may rent their personal apartment out while are on vacation or anything like that."
The subpoena came after Airbnb refused to collaborate with the investigation, as other services have done, the source said.
The company published a blog post on the matter on Monday, criticizing the subpoena, and promising to fight against it.
"The vast majority of these hosts are everyday New Yorkers who occasionally share the home in which they live," wrote David Hantman, Airbnb's head of global public policy. "We always want to work with governments to make the Airbnb community stronger, but at this point, this demand is unreasonably broad and we will fight it with everything we’ve got."
The legal fight between the city and Airbnb was ignited in 2011, when the city passed a law against illegal hotels that banned landlords from renting out their apartments for less than a 30-day period. The law led to a hard-fought case in which a man was first fined $7,000 dollars for renting out a room in his apartment. An appeal lowered the fine to $2,400 in June, but the judge still declared that renting out an entire apartment on Airbnb is illegal.
At the end of September, the New York City Environmental Control Board reversed the fines.
At the time, Airbnb celebrated the ruling as a victory, but opponents remained skeptical.
"Airbnb may have scored a PR victory with the success of this appeal, but that's all it is. The vast majority of Airbnb's business in New York City — short-term rentals of apartments in residential buildings without any permanent residents present — remains unambiguously illegal," said New York State Senator Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) in a statement.
In simple terms, New York doesn't want people to take advantage of Airbnb and turn apartments into illegal hotels by renting rooms short term, and Airbnb believes the majority of its hosts don't do that anyway, so the law — and now the subpoena — in unfairly targeting them all.
"We believe the Attorney General is only seeking to target an incredibly small number of bad actors who abuse the Airbnb platform," the blog post reads. "That’s a goal we all share. Bad actors like illegal hotel operators and slumlords aren’t part of our vision and have no place on Airbnb and we hope we can work with State leaders to weed out these individuals."
Image: Photo by Lucas Jackson-Pool/Getty Images