EU Law and the Public Regulation of the Platform Economy: The Case of the Short-Term Rental Market

While the emergence of the platform economy has undoubtedly brought advantages, it has also generated significant challenges to (local) government. National and local regulators seeking to address such challenges are confronted with the limits of EU law, which seemingly grants online platforms a wide degree of freedom to provide their services within the Union’s internal market. In this article, we evaluate the room for national and local authorities to regulate platform-mediated services under the E-Commerce Directive and Services Directive after the ‘Airbnb cases’ (Airbnb Ireland and Cali Apartments). Taking the short-term rental market as our case study, we conclude that there is in fact considerable room to target both the intermediary services provided by the platforms (upstream) as well as the underlying services (downstream). A combination of upstream and downstream regulation is to be recommended for local enforcement to be effective and halt the trend towards the fragmentation of ever stricter regulation.