Airbnb can do whatever they want in property they own/lease. However since they 'share' (funny word that) people's private homes they will have to live with the fact that those people will refuse guests for whatever reasons they feel like, this is the flip side of the coin of not having a relationship where they are in control (employer, employee, owner of the premises).
Airbnb wants to have its cake and eat it too, on the one hand not to own the premises and the goods stored in there but to pretend that they own it and set the rules about who can and can't come there.
Nobody is going to admit to discrimination, even if they do agree, people will come up with alternative reasons for not allowing the people they do not wish to stay in their private homes, so nothing will change but Airbnb will look good.
After all, what proof will they use to tell a host they are discriminating.
If Airbnb wants to be able to dictate the terms at that level they should build a nice large building with a front desk with people they employ and a bunch of rooms they let out aka a hotel.
> Nobody is going to admit to discrimination, even if they do agree, people will come up with alternative reasons for not allowing the people they do not wish to stay in their private homes, so nothing will change but Airbnb will look good.
Correct. That's the whole point.
It's basically just a political/marketing move the were probably forced to take.
Nothing will change.
"What proof?" you ask? Housing antidiscrimination enforcement teams have been highly skilled at gathering this proof for well over a generation and making charges stick. Not sure about this? Ask your favorite search engine to look up "housing discrimination enforcement NYC" for example.
If Airbnb were a local chamber of commerce making bookings for bed and breakfast places, it might be valid that they're just a booking office.
But they're a major source of accommodations in large cities. As such they have to at least pretend to abide by those cities' antidiscrimination regulations. This policy is a way to do that without customizing the rules for each jurisdiction.
People are free to use less controversial ways to offer their property for short term rent. I do that, and not because I discriminate (I don't), but because I want to keep a little bit more wealth in my community rather than sending it all to Sand Hill Road.
Generally went renting a room, you are allowed to discriminate. A post of three girls looking for a forth girl to share is generally legal.
So it seems like this commitment is actually going past what the law says.
I would never rent our my place so maybe I am not the target audience. But this would lower my odds even more. If I own the place, I want to discriminate on who stays there.
If AirBnB is able to dictate what it's landlords can and can't do that makes them disguised employees no? Something else the government is good at sniffing out!
The protected class citizens have a line drawn somewhere. The federal courts agree for roommates, you can discriminate because a roommate is a more intimate relationship than selling a house or renting out a house.
Since AirBnB is supposedly sharing...I don't see how that's different from getting roommates. They would have to reclassify their whole stance on being about "sharing economy" and admit they are more for renting homes than sharing homes, and not allow of renting out a hoise while the owner also lives there.
While they are at it, they can get Uber to reclassify themselves as a taxi company too.
Yes, Airbnb can do what they want with their property, namely their website and business. If you don't like it then they even outline what you can do in the linked article.
"If you cancel your account as a guest, any future reservations you have will be refunded according to the hosts' cancellation policy."
So, if you don't agree to this demand by AirBnB that wasn't on the table when you agreed to your booking, then you just lose your money.
If AirBnB was fair about this then it would let the user off the hook and pay out any cancellation fees/compensation out of its own funds. It's not like many people aren't going to agree anyway.
They are extending 'their website and business' into private property. That's a direct conflict without resolution, I confidently predict nothing will change and this is just window-dressing.
Yes indeed, Airbnb can do what they want with their property, namely their website and business, and their customers property is not their business.
> if you don't like it then they even outline what you can do in the linked article.
Yes, you can ignore it, or you can move to a competitor and so on. Airbnb simply is not in a position to force anybody to accept guests they do not want to entertain for whatever reason, that's the way they set things up because that is the easiest for them. To now retro-fit a requirement that you can't discriminate is there to look good, not for you to stop discriminating. The only way they could enforce that is by forcing Airbnb hosts to accept all guests without the ability to refuse any of them and that will never happen.
This is not the problem. The problem is that Airbnb is making demands on what people do or don't do with their own homes far beyond providing bed and/or breakfast. They're making demands about how people think. My head is not their property. My home is not their property.
It's improper and intolerant of them to make these kinds of demands. In fact, it's a form of totalitarianism to not do business with anyone who doesn't think exactly like us.
As an airbnb guest, I'm respectful of the fact that I'm a guest in someone's home. Their home, their rules. It seems like airbnb is trying to change that dynamic. Now, anyone who wants to be a rude guest can complain about unspecified group think violations. Sad.
It's pretty easy. Airbnb have all the data they need. Infer the race/gender/sexuality of each guest using standard techniques and then look at relative acceptance/decline rates among hosts for those groups you wish to measure discrimination for. It's a few days work with a db/excel/python.
Wrong logic. This is the VERY reason we have societies so that we can agree to certain standards (laws). Laws cannot stop anyone from doing anything, they just exist so you understand there are consequences to certain actions. If we follow your logic everything will be left as is and we'll have anarchy.
No, Airbnb is flouting the law left right and center but will hide behind it when it suits their purpose.
This whole affair is simply to avoid some bad press, not to make any sweeing changes in Airbnb policies. Now they can point to their TOS and say 'see, it wasn't us', kick out the occasional host that makes them a target for bad press and continue business as usual.
A real change would be to:
(1) force hosts to accept all guests, without any kind of ability on the part of the host to decline guests
and
(2) to not show the guest details until the person shows up to receive the key.
I used to work in a camping site in Northern Italy many years ago. We were openly told not to accept people from the south of Italy as they statistically were more noisy. I didn't like it but it actually made sense. It just wasn't viable to mix Germans and Napoleteans in a tight space.
I guess Germans earned that right with politness.
Then one day I let gipsies in and I almost got fired.
What would make sense is to say "we only accept campers that are quiet at night - and we'll throw them out of they don't comply and disturb other people's sleep". What you did is racism.
Now ever if your statistics were true (I doubt you properly measured that) it simply doesn't matter. Even if 90% of people from some region are noisy at night that doesn't justify rejecting the other 10%.
I think the decision to pre-filter was based on the fact that kicking someone out was extremely difficult. Police had to be involved or some really bad thing had to happen.
So the approach "ok we let anyone in, these are the rules, if you don't respect them you are out" is for sure more fair but it just wouldn't work.
Theory vs Reality.
And when you have 2000 people in a tight space you kind of want to avoid these situations.
I have no statistics but we can safely assume that 30 years of experience have taught the camping managers what works and what doesn't.
I think it was in their right to decide who comes in and who doesn't.
I'm Italian and if you won't let me into your crystal shop because I wave too much my hands when I talk and you're afraid I'll break something (I personally don't wave hands), I'll understand. I will be angry sure, but not with you: with the other hand waving italians.
I am on your side, but to play the devil's advocate, this is a case in which a way to predict loudness before they get loud is required. Is there a way to do this effectively without dipping into protected categories? Nobody wears 2am loudness on their forehead when checking in at 4pm.
I wonder which right should prevail in general:
a) the right to host people I like and don't host people I dislike in my home
b) the right to be what I want and be accepted everywhere.
Again, I guess A should probably prevail and the Internet should take care of matching who I am with the hosts happy to have me.
"regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age"
We also manage bookings for apartments on the beach and openly write "Apartment for families. Groups of young people up to 30 years are not accepted." in Airbnb and other portals.
So, is Airbnb saying we'll be forced to accept noisy and unruly drunk groups who will probably bring drugs and extra friends in the middle of the night damaging the newly build apartments?
This just makes no sense.
So it will be either:
- This is not real, just some facade for political correctness
- We'll get customers from other portals
What a sad and pathetic excuse for discrimination based on culture and values. You're not only generalizing you seem to be in denial. Pay a visit to any popular vacation holiday in Spain or Portugal and test for yourself who are the loud, abnocious and ugly Europeans. We are doing our best to avoid any concentration of brits, Germans and Dutch on our holidays for the exact reason. We recently bought a house in Spain in a place we made sure was not popular with either, for this particular reason. Will be happy to share with you photos of ugly drunken Germans in mas lpalomas, loud and voulgar brits in Barcelona and Ibiza, a city which is struggling to contain this problem, which is mostly due to British visitors, or all of them in place like el Garf. You might want to discriminate based on money, but like the Russians are teaching us, no amount of money in the world can help hide voulgarity. Drumpf btw is of German extract. I'm sure you'll enjoy your company and will probably deserve it.
> What a sad and pathetic excuse for discrimination based on culture and values
Discrimination based on skin color seems self evidently bad, but discrimination based on culture and values seems not just not bad, but actively good!
Why should i associate with someone who regards theft as okay? Why would i want to hire someone who thinks that disagreements should be solved with yelling or fistfights?
A few years later I worked in Benidorm and I know what you mean :)
Only it turns out those Germans in the camping were a different sort: zero problems, ever.
I'm sure we would have been told to refuse Germans if they had been noisy/impolite.
I'm also pretty sure 90% of the south italians we refused would have been nice and polite and more friendly that the average German.
That's why I said I didn't like it.
But it's the other 10% they were trying to avoid.
10% bad guys can easily spoil the holiday to 90% good ones.
Not an easy business to be in, but sometimes you don't have a choice.
It's sad to see the tech community, which used to be very libertarian, move towards a hard-left progressive view of social issues. It wasn't that long ago that Friedman's arguments against equal pay laws[1] would have held sway here. The idea that the market punishes bigotry and so can be relied upon to advance freedom and equality used to be a core belief of the tech community. Now, it seems companies are falling over themselves to come up with ever more progressive and authoritarian solutions to problems that have only been complained about in the tech media--driven largely by people who care far more about culture wars than they do about tech. It's hard to see these developments and not feel that something important has been lost.
There's nothing unlibertarian about a private business making up its own terms of services and privately enforcing them. That's exactly how the free market self regulates without the use of force.
When a single business dominates an entire industry in such a way, it's not just a "private business" anymore - it's an institution and should be treated as such.
This is the market punishing bigotry. People are making noise and demanding change, alternative businesses are being created to address these people's needs, and Airbnb is modifying its policies in response.
I want the right to be racist. I'm not a bigot- my girlfriend is Hispanic, I'm from a majority black neighborhood, my parents are gay, etc. But thoughts and words should never be forbidden.
That's basically the whole point of liberalism. You're free to be someone that pisses me off.
They have the right to be as racist as one likes, of course, limited to hate crimes. Airbnb is making a business decision that it doesn't want to service these people. That's Airbnb's right as a business, in a classical libertarian view.
We became leftists because libertarianism is harsh and unrealistic.
Most people are not smart enough for a libertarian world they get swayed by propaganda too easily and are unable to judge risk correctly. It's more efficient to have technocrats guide the public and protect them from short sighted mistakes and evil corporations. Most people don't even understand the difference between a percentage point and a percent and these same people, if left to their own devices, create hellish cities and countries. If we were all intelligent technocrats libertarianism (in the minarchist sense) would still be wrong, but it wouldn't fail so hilariously since we'd all have contracts for nearly everything, but as it stands now it's completely unrealistic to imagine a Gary Johnson United States.
People discriminate every day. I discriminate against restaurants and babysitters and businesses all the time. Sometimes those discriminations are because of a feeling. Sometimes they are are based on my internal biases. Sometimes I disagree with the choices a business has made and if affects whether or not I do business with them.
Why do we make such a big deal about "discrimination?" It's built into who we are as people.
If some of us weren't constantly trying to get over our base instincts of discrimination we would still be in the times of segregation.
If your subconscious discrimination is constantly being pointed out through various channels, it starts causing you to question it. Obviously it's slow and might take generations, but that's the nature of the process. I will give you a personal example - I grew up in a country where making fun of gay/transgender people is very common. So subconsciously I judged and probably discriminated against gay/transgender people. When I moved to California and I heard and saw the messages of marriage equality I started to question my subconscious. Now I'm at the point where watching movies from my home country makes me cringe every time a crass gay joke gets cracked.
You are obviously not being discriminating against where it matters. Here are a few examples that wouldn't be a big deal to you accordingly:
1) School says they won't accept your daughter, but hey it's not a big deal according to you
2) Neighborhood won't let you buy a house you like because they don't like your wife's skin color, but hey it's not a big deal
3) You are getting paid less at work and skipped for promotion in favor of Elmud because he is one of them and you are not, but hey it's not a big deal
Discrimination IS NOT ok. It IS NOT built into us. It is an acquired taste. Bad taste. First we accept the issue then we work on fixing it.
I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus is still out on how much of discrimination stems from innate tendencies. If you have any reputable sources that say otherwise, it would be interesting to see them. My hunch is that the dynamics are far too complex amorphous for us to definitively pin down the causes any time soon.
Nonetheless, I don't think this is important for your main point. We have been working around our suboptimal innate tendencies for millennia.
It says that you fund counter-culture movements as much as possible for them to go completely full-scale. Examples:
Black lives matter (which was a honest one at first) then went full kamikaze.
Let's bring 1M+ syrians, what could go wrong (when Albania was in ~civil-unrest in 1997 all borders closed).
Multiculturalism is ok friend. All cultures are equal (they're not, many suck, like roma example that I gave in another comment).
I think it's about scale. If you as a single individual discriminate, no big deal. If a nation or a large corporation discriminates, it causes serious problems.
Also, it's somewhat OK to discriminate against behavior that can be changed. So businesses are OK to be discriminated against, they are after all human creation. But we shouldn't discriminate on the basis of race or sex or ethnicity, because these are impossible to change.
However, let's say for argument sake I do want to rent my extra bedroom out. What if I don't want rent to some weirdo crust punk? I wouldn't feel like my children are safe. I would probably only rent out to single professionals only.
I guess Airbnb is not a good fit for hypothetical people like me.
What makes you think this would be against the agreement? Is crust a religion? An disability? "Dirty" isn't a protected class.
I've personally experienced that some hosts refuse to rent to unmarried couples. It was inconvenient and silly, but perfectly legal and nearly harmless (unless their actual problem was that only one of us was white, but who can say).
You have a right to pick and choose who you want in your home, even if you don't like LGBT folks, African Americans, caucassions, whatever.
But the sharing economy isn't about sharing. It's about business platforms that monetize slack capacity of different resources.
So you're operating a business now (yes, really). And a business can't discriminate against a protected class. And AirBnB wants to portray an aura of community, so instead of saying "you can't legally discriminate; don't or we'll kick you off the platform" it's the proverbial "can we not all get along?; you must to continue on the platform"
Everyone will agree to this except a few folks who want to make a point, and those people who were discriminating before will continue to do so.
Silicon Valley needs to learn that scolding, lynching, patronizing people online isn't going to fix systemic socioeconomic issues. Those take decades to show positive change, and require far more effort than the community outreach resources of a few companies in the tech industry.
Edit:
My comment should've been more specific. In a non-business setting, you can pick and choose who is in your home. Not when renting the entire premises out to someone. AirBnB tries to portray its transactions as community when it's really just a business, with the rules and regs that go with that (anti-discrimination).
What if I don't want rent to some weirdo crust punk?
The actual answer is, it depends entirely on their membership of protected classes - and if they are a member of such a class, then that fact that your discrimination against them was on grounds of weirdness, crustiness, or punkiness, won't protect you from accusations of racism or whatever.
> I agree to treat everyone in the Airbnb community—regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias.
This isn't really "non discrimination", this is a vague non binding statement. The FAQ doesn't even says what happens when that "commitment" is broken. Just that you have to accept it. So the title here is misleading.
Did you just not read two paragraphs below that where it says "What if I decline the commitment?", or do you just think it's pertinent for some reason?
Seems pretty clear: You can't discriminate, if you do we terminate your account at our discretion.
Edit: I read the question only in the narrow sense of "what if you refuse to accept the new policy" v.s. "what if you break the policy once you accept it?".
2. Section 24.C ("Termination for breach, suspension and other measures") refers to section 14 ("User Conduct") which says you can't violate the "Policies and Community Guidelines" which links to https://www.airbnb.com/help/topic/250/terms---policies
That's what happens if you decline the commitment. But what if you break the commitment? (That is, accept the commitment but discriminate anyway). I'll bet nothing at all, unless an egregious incident starts trending on social media.
They can do that when the host will be protected against abuse of by law as well. Hell, it even wouldn't be needed. If you as a host knew, you would be compensated by any ill means done by the one renting - meaning AirBnb would claim responsibility - this clause wouldn't be such an issue.
Because here's why this happens: people start declining to certain others based on experience. Some hear about others experience and don't want to even go down that road in the first place.
Modern "PC" way of thinking caters to the minorities. Rights, rights, rights and so on. Businesses market on that. Media gets clicks and views based on that. But the modern western societies have forgotten that rights are only one side of the coin, there have to be RESPONSIBILITIES too.
Responsibilities are harder, long term gratification and can cause non happy feelings. But no one can enforce rights without them, or we get to see the extreme effects as we do now.
Readit News
Airbnb wants to have its cake and eat it too, on the one hand not to own the premises and the goods stored in there but to pretend that they own it and set the rules about who can and can't come there.
Nobody is going to admit to discrimination, even if they do agree, people will come up with alternative reasons for not allowing the people they do not wish to stay in their private homes, so nothing will change but Airbnb will look good.
After all, what proof will they use to tell a host they are discriminating.
If Airbnb wants to be able to dictate the terms at that level they should build a nice large building with a front desk with people they employ and a bunch of rooms they let out aka a hotel.
Correct. That's the whole point. It's basically just a political/marketing move the were probably forced to take. Nothing will change.
If Airbnb were a local chamber of commerce making bookings for bed and breakfast places, it might be valid that they're just a booking office.
But they're a major source of accommodations in large cities. As such they have to at least pretend to abide by those cities' antidiscrimination regulations. This policy is a way to do that without customizing the rules for each jurisdiction.
People are free to use less controversial ways to offer their property for short term rent. I do that, and not because I discriminate (I don't), but because I want to keep a little bit more wealth in my community rather than sending it all to Sand Hill Road.
So it seems like this commitment is actually going past what the law says.
I would never rent our my place so maybe I am not the target audience. But this would lower my odds even more. If I own the place, I want to discriminate on who stays there.
Since AirBnB is supposedly sharing...I don't see how that's different from getting roommates. They would have to reclassify their whole stance on being about "sharing economy" and admit they are more for renting homes than sharing homes, and not allow of renting out a hoise while the owner also lives there.
While they are at it, they can get Uber to reclassify themselves as a taxi company too.
This knife cuts both ways.
"If you cancel your account as a guest, any future reservations you have will be refunded according to the hosts' cancellation policy."
So, if you don't agree to this demand by AirBnB that wasn't on the table when you agreed to your booking, then you just lose your money.
If AirBnB was fair about this then it would let the user off the hook and pay out any cancellation fees/compensation out of its own funds. It's not like many people aren't going to agree anyway.
Yes indeed, Airbnb can do what they want with their property, namely their website and business, and their customers property is not their business.
> if you don't like it then they even outline what you can do in the linked article.
Yes, you can ignore it, or you can move to a competitor and so on. Airbnb simply is not in a position to force anybody to accept guests they do not want to entertain for whatever reason, that's the way they set things up because that is the easiest for them. To now retro-fit a requirement that you can't discriminate is there to look good, not for you to stop discriminating. The only way they could enforce that is by forcing Airbnb hosts to accept all guests without the ability to refuse any of them and that will never happen.
It's improper and intolerant of them to make these kinds of demands. In fact, it's a form of totalitarianism to not do business with anyone who doesn't think exactly like us.
As an airbnb guest, I'm respectful of the fact that I'm a guest in someone's home. Their home, their rules. It seems like airbnb is trying to change that dynamic. Now, anyone who wants to be a rude guest can complain about unspecified group think violations. Sad.
Testers. That's partially how the government got evidence to sue Trump in the 1970s for housing discrimination.
This whole affair is simply to avoid some bad press, not to make any sweeing changes in Airbnb policies. Now they can point to their TOS and say 'see, it wasn't us', kick out the occasional host that makes them a target for bad press and continue business as usual.
A real change would be to:
(1) force hosts to accept all guests, without any kind of ability on the part of the host to decline guests
and
(2) to not show the guest details until the person shows up to receive the key.
Anything short of that is simply window dressing.
Deleted Comment
Now ever if your statistics were true (I doubt you properly measured that) it simply doesn't matter. Even if 90% of people from some region are noisy at night that doesn't justify rejecting the other 10%.
I have no statistics but we can safely assume that 30 years of experience have taught the camping managers what works and what doesn't. I think it was in their right to decide who comes in and who doesn't.
I'm Italian and if you won't let me into your crystal shop because I wave too much my hands when I talk and you're afraid I'll break something (I personally don't wave hands), I'll understand. I will be angry sure, but not with you: with the other hand waving italians.
Again, I guess A should probably prevail and the Internet should take care of matching who I am with the hosts happy to have me.
"regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age"
We also manage bookings for apartments on the beach and openly write "Apartment for families. Groups of young people up to 30 years are not accepted." in Airbnb and other portals. So, is Airbnb saying we'll be forced to accept noisy and unruly drunk groups who will probably bring drugs and extra friends in the middle of the night damaging the newly build apartments? This just makes no sense.
So it will be either: - This is not real, just some facade for political correctness - We'll get customers from other portals
And
avoid any concentration of brits, Germans and Dutch
Make an interesting juxtaposition. You might want to think about that.
Discrimination based on skin color seems self evidently bad, but discrimination based on culture and values seems not just not bad, but actively good!
Why should i associate with someone who regards theft as okay? Why would i want to hire someone who thinks that disagreements should be solved with yelling or fistfights?
Not an easy business to be in, but sometimes you don't have a choice.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsIpQ7YguGE
I'm not saying AirBnB has moved that much, but maybe you mean regressive left, though
That's basically the whole point of liberalism. You're free to be someone that pisses me off.
Most people are not smart enough for a libertarian world they get swayed by propaganda too easily and are unable to judge risk correctly. It's more efficient to have technocrats guide the public and protect them from short sighted mistakes and evil corporations. Most people don't even understand the difference between a percentage point and a percent and these same people, if left to their own devices, create hellish cities and countries. If we were all intelligent technocrats libertarianism (in the minarchist sense) would still be wrong, but it wouldn't fail so hilariously since we'd all have contracts for nearly everything, but as it stands now it's completely unrealistic to imagine a Gary Johnson United States.
Deleted Comment
Why do we make such a big deal about "discrimination?" It's built into who we are as people.
If your subconscious discrimination is constantly being pointed out through various channels, it starts causing you to question it. Obviously it's slow and might take generations, but that's the nature of the process. I will give you a personal example - I grew up in a country where making fun of gay/transgender people is very common. So subconsciously I judged and probably discriminated against gay/transgender people. When I moved to California and I heard and saw the messages of marriage equality I started to question my subconscious. Now I'm at the point where watching movies from my home country makes me cringe every time a crass gay joke gets cracked.
1) School says they won't accept your daughter, but hey it's not a big deal according to you
2) Neighborhood won't let you buy a house you like because they don't like your wife's skin color, but hey it's not a big deal
3) You are getting paid less at work and skipped for promotion in favor of Elmud because he is one of them and you are not, but hey it's not a big deal
Discrimination IS NOT ok. It IS NOT built into us. It is an acquired taste. Bad taste. First we accept the issue then we work on fixing it.
Nonetheless, I don't think this is important for your main point. We have been working around our suboptimal innate tendencies for millennia.
It says that you fund counter-culture movements as much as possible for them to go completely full-scale. Examples:
Black lives matter (which was a honest one at first) then went full kamikaze. Let's bring 1M+ syrians, what could go wrong (when Albania was in ~civil-unrest in 1997 all borders closed).
Multiculturalism is ok friend. All cultures are equal (they're not, many suck, like roma example that I gave in another comment).
Also, it's somewhat OK to discriminate against behavior that can be changed. So businesses are OK to be discriminated against, they are after all human creation. But we shouldn't discriminate on the basis of race or sex or ethnicity, because these are impossible to change.
However, let's say for argument sake I do want to rent my extra bedroom out. What if I don't want rent to some weirdo crust punk? I wouldn't feel like my children are safe. I would probably only rent out to single professionals only.
I guess Airbnb is not a good fit for hypothetical people like me.
I've personally experienced that some hosts refuse to rent to unmarried couples. It was inconvenient and silly, but perfectly legal and nearly harmless (unless their actual problem was that only one of us was white, but who can say).
You have a right to pick and choose who you want in your home, even if you don't like LGBT folks, African Americans, caucassions, whatever.
But the sharing economy isn't about sharing. It's about business platforms that monetize slack capacity of different resources.
So you're operating a business now (yes, really). And a business can't discriminate against a protected class. And AirBnB wants to portray an aura of community, so instead of saying "you can't legally discriminate; don't or we'll kick you off the platform" it's the proverbial "can we not all get along?; you must to continue on the platform"
Everyone will agree to this except a few folks who want to make a point, and those people who were discriminating before will continue to do so.
Silicon Valley needs to learn that scolding, lynching, patronizing people online isn't going to fix systemic socioeconomic issues. Those take decades to show positive change, and require far more effort than the community outreach resources of a few companies in the tech industry.
Edit:
My comment should've been more specific. In a non-business setting, you can pick and choose who is in your home. Not when renting the entire premises out to someone. AirBnB tries to portray its transactions as community when it's really just a business, with the rules and regs that go with that (anti-discrimination).
The future is funny. That might be considered discrimination?
In a lot of cases this is due to the host's religious beliefs. In that case, who is discriminating against who?
The actual answer is, it depends entirely on their membership of protected classes - and if they are a member of such a class, then that fact that your discrimination against them was on grounds of weirdness, crustiness, or punkiness, won't protect you from accusations of racism or whatever.
Dead Comment
This isn't really "non discrimination", this is a vague non binding statement. The FAQ doesn't even says what happens when that "commitment" is broken. Just that you have to accept it. So the title here is misleading.
Deleted Comment
Seems pretty clear: You can't discriminate, if you do we terminate your account at our discretion.
Edit: I read the question only in the narrow sense of "what if you refuse to accept the new policy" v.s. "what if you break the policy once you accept it?".
The answer to the latter seems to be:
1. You have to agree to Airbnb's TOS to use their site: https://www.airbnb.com/terms
2. Section 24.C ("Termination for breach, suspension and other measures") refers to section 14 ("User Conduct") which says you can't violate the "Policies and Community Guidelines" which links to https://www.airbnb.com/help/topic/250/terms---policies
3. That links to their nondiscrimination policy (https://www.airbnb.com/help/topic/533/nondiscrimination), which seems to be the longer legalese version of what the linked blogpost is a tl;dr of.
It doesn't explain what happens if one accepts the commitment and still discriminates.
> Seems pretty clear: You can't discriminate, if you do we terminate your account at our discretion.
That's not what the text says. The text basically says :
"If you don't answer Yes to the commitment, we will terminates your account".
It doesn't say
"if you actually do discriminate we will terminates your account"
Seems pretty clear what that FAQ doesn't say. It says nothing about what Airbnb will do if an host or guest discriminates.
What's clear is that if you press "no" on the popup, they'll terminate your account.
What will happen if you press "yes" and then continue to discriminate however you like? My guess: not much.
Because here's why this happens: people start declining to certain others based on experience. Some hear about others experience and don't want to even go down that road in the first place.
Modern "PC" way of thinking caters to the minorities. Rights, rights, rights and so on. Businesses market on that. Media gets clicks and views based on that. But the modern western societies have forgotten that rights are only one side of the coin, there have to be RESPONSIBILITIES too.
Responsibilities are harder, long term gratification and can cause non happy feelings. But no one can enforce rights without them, or we get to see the extreme effects as we do now.