Am studying civics stuff for my citizenship test, and it seems to me that Yishan Wong's argument is actually specifically encoded in the 9th amendment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nin...

This seems to me like an articulation of the procrastination principle/lazy enforcement/lazy evaluation principle.

Or to over-simplify, "if it is not explicitly prohibited, assume it can be done" as opposed to "if it is not explicitly allowed, assume it can't be done."

Here, the assumption rests on the interpretation of the word "hotel" and whether a home opened up to paying guests is a hotel at all.

There is also a legal heuristic called De Minimis that essentially means "don't bother regulating trifles."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_...

So an exception clause to the general lazy evaluation heuristic is that you perk up and pay attention if something gets too big, too fast.

Combining with this general disruption theory in innovation, here's what will happen.

1. At some point the traditional hotel industry will notice that they are being disrupted.

2. They'll yell "not de minimis anymore, regulate these guys!"

3. By then it will be too late.

An interesting comparison is with how the used-book market (mostly unregulated) helped Amazon's rise to power. When Amazon basically became the organizer of that marketplace, the proportion of used book sales as a percentage of overall book sales skyrocketed from 4% to about 25% in just a couple of years. By the time the book industry noticed that they'd lost pricing power, it was too late. I am betting a legal argument against used books (kinda like music copying) might have been made if the rise had been slower.