Barcelona Mayor Threatens the Great Firewall of Catalonia to Fight AirBnB
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Barcelona mayor has outlawed AirBnB and any unlicensed apartment rentals (renting out your own home is now a crime in Barcelona, say goodbye to being able to afford to own there) there. This is, in theory, for the purpose of curbing the destructive tourism trade there. But hidden in this agenda is the threat that Barcelona and Catalonia will be using this as an excuse to construct a firewall and begin restricting Internet access. Of course they only claim that AirBnB and similar sites will be blocked (at first) but that is never how Internet censorship works. First it is tourism, then it is sites talking about tourism, then it is people complaining about censorship and soon news, media and everything is filtered to only allow that which the government agrees to allow. We have seen this in every major country implementing a censorship strategy, and this plans to start with targeting individually chosen businesses and websites!
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From the article:
In an attempt to pre-empt the council’s actions, last year Airbnb conducted and published research on its operations in Barcelona. According to the study, tourists that visit using Airbnb tend to stay in the less visited areas of the city; a fact Airbnb has suggested is dispersing tourists’ euros around the city in a more equitable manner. Airbnb also estimates that there has been a total of €175 million of activity in the Catalan capital, a fact that might be caused by Airbnb guests staying 2.4 times longer and spending 2.3 times more money than typical tourists.
However, given the scale and intensity of local opposition to continued growth of tourism in Barcelona, neither this data nor the pleas of unlicensed landlords, many of whom use the money to help pay their bills and stay in their homes, are likely to elicit much sympathy.
It sounds very clear that the attack is a personal vendetta between the mayor and a single company and is not in the interest of the people and the city. All the more reason that this is probably having to do with something far more political and not for the reasons that the mayor claims it is. If the goals so to fix the city, crippling the existing landlords, making people lose their homes and attacking an individual business with a run up to an attempt at Internet censorship would never be the path chosen.
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@mlnews said:
But hidden in this agenda is the threat that Barcelona and Catalonia will be using this as an excuse to construct a firewall and begin restricting Internet access.
Where does it say that? I can't believe any European government would get away with internet censorship like this.
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We were considering a three month stay in Barcelona and this took it right off of the table. We use AirBnB for long term stays in cities like this and since we more or less live in Spain, when we come into a city like Barcelona to visit we generally do so in a very healthy way, helping to support locals who need to supplement their income on the weekends to help pay their bills.
So this is one long term resident family lost on day one by this mayor. No idea how this impacts the average tourist, but our family data sounds like the AirBnB data, the mayor is doing the exact opposite of what she publicly claims that she is doing.
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in the face of homogenization that accompanies the arrival of multinational chain stores.
If that was their goal, why don't they ban those instead? Making people lose their homes as an indirect attack on chain stores makes no sense. Don't let the chains build in the first place!
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@scottalanmiller said:
in the face of homogenization that accompanies the arrival of multinational chain stores.
If that was their goal, why don't they ban those instead? Making people lose their homes as an indirect attack on chain stores makes no sense. Don't let the chains build in the first place!
I was just going to mention that. Or make it very hard for those chain stores to compete in that environment. Banning rentals is the exact opposite of what they are going to want to do. If people can't afford their homes they are going to start shopping at less expensive chain stores.
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If the company refuses to cooperate, the City Council may even initiate proceedings to prevent online access to the site from the entire Catalan territory.
They are attempting to force an NSA-like action of turning over private data with the threat of Internet censorship as the means to forcing it to happen. It's actually worse than just censorship, it is attempting to breach privacy and security as well! This is truly evil and yes, let's hope that Madrid and or Brussels steps in and shuts this down. This is horrible and one can only hope that Europe has better protections than this.
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This certainly shows that I had been extremely foolish to think that Catalonia was in any way prepared for self governing. I've been supportive of them up until now.
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And notice that the mayor of one city is attempting to use her power, at least to threaten, to take away the rights for people in other cities and towns to have access to things that are perfectly legal there! This isn't about Barcelona or her own role as mayor, this is very much something else. She's not just out to hurt a business or two that she doesn't like, she's out to hurt people who have no power to vote for her as well!
She knows very well that stopping AirBnB in Catalonia will increase the hotel business in Barcelona by making it almost impossible to get low cost accommodations in the rest of Catalonia.
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Something that Rick Steves has pointed out in his videos about Europe... home rentals on the continent are a staple of the culture. This means that Barcelona isn't attempting to support the traditional culture, they are trying to change it. This isn't about protecting the city, this is about controlling a region.
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You'd think that watching other people make this mistake over and over would set a good example for the future, but no one seems to learn.
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@MattSpeller said:
You'd think that watching other people make this mistake over and over would set a good example for the future, but no one seems to learn.
I'm told that this mayor hasn't been like this in the past and has actually had a decent track record of doing non-evil things. Someone suggested that she may be making incredibly threats in the hopes of enacting change. But these aren't the kinds of threats you can back down from. Using fear and corruption to try to force changes that the law and democracy do not support is, well, evil. Especially when the end result is something unethical and bad.
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I am putting together a short article about why we won't visit Barcelona again until this gets fixed. I'm so disgusted by Catalonia, I can't believe it. It seems like such a nice place when we were last there in 2012.
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Apparently shutting down expression is something she has been involved with previously:
Scroll down to see the English version.
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wasup with this?
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ahahaha ignore - internal issue.
PS: Fortigate is still blocking you
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We should start a petition to get Fortigate to have better policies.
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@scottalanmiller said:
We should start a petition to get Fortigate to have better policies.
What good would that be? They'd never see it!
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It looks like the bit about blocking the website comes from a statement the government released over a year ago (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/08/catalonia-fines-airbnb-threatens-to-block-locals-from-using-site/). So before the mayor came to power. It was a stupid idea and it doesn't look like it's gone anywhere.
I'm not sure why you're singling her out, but it doesn't look like this is anything to do with her. Unlicenced tourist apartments have always been illegal in Barcelona, as they are in many cities (including New York I believe?). This is nothing new. What is new is her suggestion of using existing laws to help solve the chronic social housing problem in Barcelona, which on the face of it seems laudable, but I suspect in practice simply won't work.
Whether you're in favour of allowing unlicenced tourist rentals or not (and I'm on the fence), Barcelona clearly has a housing problem and is in danger of becoming like Venice - a museum where no locals can afford to live. I can see why they're considering all their options. I suspect that an article showing why a family of Americans are refusing to visit will be met by the majority of locals with "good, that's the idea".
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@Carnival-Boy said:
It looks like the bit about blocking the website comes from a statement the government released over a year ago (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/08/catalonia-fines-airbnb-threatens-to-block-locals-from-using-site/). So before the mayor came to power. It was a stupid idea and it doesn't look like it's gone anywhere.
Hopefully it goes nowhere. She threatened, according to the article, not just businesses she didn't like but competing municipalities. Hopefully the EU has good protections for this stuff. Sad that they would have to step in and use them, though.
