It also doesn't mean that the laws should be repealed. In the context of things like AirBnB and Kickstarter, people tend to only see the "good side" because the laws prevent the large-scale "bad side" from taking root. E.g. they see someone putting their apartment on AirBnB while they're on vacation, but not the shady dude turning an entire building on a quiet residential block into an AirBnB hotel for rowdy college students. They see someone funding a video game on Kickstarter, but not the people swindling the public on a large scale.
It's interesting to note that people jump on Goldman for selling shitty financial products too retirement funds and the like, but don't see the potential for abuse with something like crowdfunding. If Goldman can make a killing swindling sophisticated institutional investors, don't you think it'd be child's play for someone to do it to unsophisticated members of the public?
These sorts of laws have the incidental effect of suppressing potentially useful transactions on an individual level, but the point of them is to prevent people from making a business out of abusing the system. E.g. I have noted before that the real point of copyright protections isn't to keep an individual from copying a Windows CD for a friend (probably not going to do a lot of economic damage to Microsoft), but to keep a major Chinese OEM from shipping computers with copied Windows licenses (might do a lot more economic damage). These regulations are similar in that regard. By making them illegal, you keep people from building a large-scale business out of cheating others.
The measures were put in place to prevent building owners from turning their apartment complexes into unregulated hotels to avoid paying additional taxes. Because those hotels were unregulated anyway, they often were in a lax state, and so health and safety also became an issue.
Conversely, per Airbnb's quote, 87% of the rooms listed on the site are people's own homes of which they rent out a portion, or the whole thing for a limited time they rent out. So these are not people trying to circumvent the tax law (and by all means tax their Airbnb income as a hotel would be), they are just trying to make additional income to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Those 87% were not the target of the law, because this model did not exist at the time.
Well for one, Uber has had all kinds of problems being allowed to run taxies for hire in NY, and one of the complaints has been that they don't have a city certified taxi-meter installed.
That regulation might have made sense before GPS enabled smartphones -- especially when said GPS enabled smartphones are the only way to hail an Uber car.
I don't know the reason for banning unlicened hotels, but I imagine that at least one of the examples used were the safety of the cusomers -- that is kinda pointless given that the customer can check out the reviews on AirBNB before he decides to engage in business.
