Samenvatting

This article shows how the municipality of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) has coped with the popularity of home sharing platform Airbnb. In collaboration with Airbnb, the municipality of Amsterdam was the first to come up with regulations for home sharing. However, enforcement of these rules proved difficult without access to user data of the Airbnb platform. In addition, a scientific (statistical) assessment of the effects of homesharing is also difficult without open data. As a result, the legitimacy of the platform has weakened in the eyes of some stakeholders. The article ends with some general reflections how government can cope with sharing economy platform. In particular, it is argued that the right-to-challenge principle may prove hard to apply to sharing platforms.