Here, we have 2 reasons that Paterson and the New York State Assembly/Senate got involved:

1) There is a legitimate public health concern with running unlicensed hotels -- subletting your 2 bedroom for a couple months is one thing, renting places in order to run a business out of them while circumventing health regs that are there for good reason is something entirely different. They were seeing a shift to the latter.

2) Simultaneously, hotels have money, have lobbyists, didn't like this and had a great argument to make with public health. The senator in question can keep the donations flowing while all the while claiming he's only concerned about the public welfare.

So, some mixture of that is what happened. Notice how none of it involved Glenn Beck's nightmare socialist conspiring to reduce "freedom" and expand "government" in order to, you know, piss off Glenn Beck or whatever motivates all of those socialists. When you unpack political reality, it turns out to be a lot less about "government vs private sector" and a lot more a combination of who has the money (usually one aspect of the private sector).

Edit: as noted below, the implied question is: what "legimate health concerns" exist for short-term renting but not couchsurfing?

I thought it would be instructive for people who talk about "government" as if just putting the word big in front of it solves the issue, and the solution is cut taxes for rich people. None of that has anything to do with this. This is a concrete policy change in a specific area.

If you allow people to not be present at all, then some will turn this into a business and operate a real hotel room, 365 days a year. Operated like a cheap hotel. I can see why the government may want to regulate that.

An easy way to distinguish the above situation from legitimate friends staying over, is to ask for the owner to be present. Or couchsurfing. That tends to make it a more casual and better controlled environment. I can understand why the government may want to stay out of this.

My impression is that the real criteria should be how much the room is rented: if you have guests 300 days a year, you should be regulated. If it's 10 days, leave me alone. The problem is that it's probably hard to define, and may impose its own set of requirements (such as, everyone would have to keep a registry of all visitors, just to prove that they don't fall into the hotel category).

I don't think this is a totally absurdly black and white case, it's no oppressive regime rearing its ugly head. Both sides have ulterior motives (AirBnB and the established hotels), but their arguments aren't totally without merit. And one thing that people keep forgetting, is that this law isn't breaking new grounds, both renting and hotels are pretty heavily regulated, mostly for a good reason. Yes, for the hard-core magical hand of the market libertarians this is another nail in the coffin, but I bet that a lot of people that get too angry in this discussion don't have problems with laws against arbitrary landlord decisions or hotel health and emergency codes.

Let's keep this reasonable…

Says who and what are those reasons? I suspect the reasons are: old people got scared and stakeholders saw an opportunity.

Luckily the Internet is mostly protected from scared old people and powerful stakeholders.

Maybe in another decade when we're all older we will be willing to give up the freedoms we once enjoyed when the Internet was still young. And it will be for "mostly good reasons."

Remember the old silent movies, where the evil, mustachioed landlord was one the most popular villainous archetypes? That wasn't without reason. People looking for a roof over their heads often aren't in a good bargaining position, so often you could make them sign almost any contract. There are quite a few federal and local laws that limit what's possible in all these cases, so that your landlord e.g. can't evict you all willy-nilly. Rent control is also rather common.

Same goes for hotels, especially when it comes to security (emergency exits, maximum occupancy etc.).

Whether every single law (including this new once) make sense is another question, but my point is that this isn't something completely new, were all of a sudden the octogenarians ruling the world decided to come down on the poor cyber-startups.

What that doesn't mean is freedom to gather with a bunch of friends where and whenever you want. What it does mean is the legal right to stage peaceful protests or gather in public (with reasonable restrictions).

If needed I can run over to the library and grab you a list of cases on that, but I think you'll have trouble finding any for "couchsurfing."

What does a vacationing transient care about pissing in the hallway? He'll be gone in 8 hours. AirBNB ignores the reality that apartments are part of shared property. That shared property maintains its state of repair thanks to people from the building having large stakes in making sure they don't leave human feces in the stairwell.

(EDIT begins): The above paragraph is not only "not a good comparison," but a really bad comparison which entirely misses the point and argues against the below paragraphs (as jbooth's comment succinctly points out). It's only still here because I don't like deleting text I've posted; I still support most of it (especially it being common courtesy not to cause discomfort to your hosts, regardless of any regulations or laws regulating behavior), even though the basic idea is horrible. You should disregard it, and focus on the paragraphs below. (EDIT ends)

However, if you are going to get up in arms about the potential for noisy guests, and require legislation to prevent it in some way, it makes far more sense, to me, to empower apartment owners to kick out anyone who sublets an apartment to noisy guests, and allow legal recourse for the people in surrounding apartments if this does not occur. A system of incentives would thus be created for people renting out a spare room to make sure to educate their visitors about the behavioral standards they are expected to follow, and to enforce these standards. This would create greater freedom for everyone, and the owner of the building has the option of stipulating that short-term sub-letting is not permitted in whatever contract they have with their renters.

The problem of actual unlicensed hotels - a set of rooms lived in by no one but short-term renters - is entirely different, and is the problem which should be removed by legislation. It's also the problem which many of the people who are against AirBnB and similar sites are thinking of; there is a world of difference between a group of tourists given free reign in an apartment and one or two tourists renting a bedroom from someone who is living in and present in the apartment. This difference is perhaps why so many of the people who have tried such services are in favor of it; they have been in the latter situation, which seemed quite pleasant to them and which was completely preferable to hotels (all of the stories I've heard of users of such services describe this situation). The people who are angry about it (outside of the hotel industry) without actually coming into contact with it (short-term renting of the adjacent apartment, with whatever results) are thinking of the first situation.

Or at least, that seems to be the case, from reading many of the comments on this article. It's quite likely that I'm misunderstanding something, of course.

Dear god I read your entire post only to realize you entirely agree with the legislation that was just passed only you have no idea what the new law means.

You can let someone crash at your house if you're away, but you cannot charge.

(Also: previous comment edited to incorporate exactly how terrible the comparison was. It was really more of a jumping-off point for the rest of my musings ...)