The thing is... it's not actually. If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc.
You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person, and if you're even smarter, you could use that in conjunction with a map of relationships between people, so you could limit the number of people putting listings in their family members names to get around any limitations.
> If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc.
Airbnb will probably follow your law, but other platforms that do not will flourish. They will be difficult to regulate, given that they won't be in your jurisdiction.
> You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person.
Many laws already exist that give unfavourable tax treatment to second and subsequent properties. They are widely avoided through family members and legal entity structures and a hand-wavy "map of relationships between people" isn't going to magically fix that. This would also have a fairly obvious negative effect: it would artificially limit supply in the rental market, driving up prices. A person who could have invested in multiple properties and supplied them to the rental market will instead supply at most one, and invest the rest of their money elsewhere.
There isn't some nefarious conspiracy preventing effective regulation in this area. It's just a legitimately hard problem.
Well, it doesn't help that many inspectors actually have to use public transports and be paid later from their travel expenses, so their control area is anyway minimal.
At least that is how remember how bad it used to be.
You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person, and if you're even smarter, you could use that in conjunction with a map of relationships between people, so you could limit the number of people putting listings in their family members names to get around any limitations.
AirBnB has the data to assist governments.