COLLABORATIVE PLATFORMS IN ACCOMMODATION accommodation platforms – except Airbnb – reached an agreement with the City Council not to publish accommodation offers that did not have a registration number. With Airbnb, an agreement was reached – after the imposition of heavy fines – that any flats advertised that do not have a license and that have been detected by the City Council, the platform will have to expel them from the license. In this situation, are the platforms obliged to filter the ads beforehand or only to remove, upon request, those that do not comply with the regional provisions? In the opinion of the City Council, this would be an incomplete solution, as it should be the platform that is responsible for ensuring that the properties that are advertised have a license and not depend on the proactive attitude of the Administration looking for offers without a license25. However, we should not forget that the Commission document entitled “A European Agenda for the Collaborative Economy” states that “under EU law, Member States may not impose on collaborative platforms, insofar as they provide data hosting services, a general obligation to monitor and actively search for facts or circumstances indicating illegal activities”. In this sense, some of these collaborative accommodation platforms -such as HomeAway- already include a registration field to include the number of the license or registration of the tourist rental property in the Autonomous Communities where it is compulsory. However, despite including this registration field, the platforms do not check the veracity of all this data because, according to them, they do not have direct management or ownership of the properties, so they are not obliged to carry out this prior control and verification of the data contained on the platform. Those who are truly obliged to comply with these regulations are the users of the platform themselves, as they are the ones who publish the advertisements. Faced with this situation, we wonder whether it is possible to demand this liability from the platform, questioning whether it would violate the provisions of Directive 2000/31. Thus, the first question to be asked is whether or not the service provided by platforms operating within the framework of the Collaborative Economy can be included within the concept of Information Society Service Provider (ISSP). If so, the exceptions to liability provided for in the regulations would apply. For ISSPs there is a liability regime that, in principle, exempts them from liability for the external content to which they provide access, host, 25 A very interesting debate was the IX Exceltur Tourism Leadership Forum (2018) “Reshaping Tourism: how to grow sustainably and speed up the digital transformation” held in Madrid. Accessible on the website http://9foro. exceltur.org/?zona=4, last access date: 21 December 2021.
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