Why would it be BS? Really, there are laws and far too many startups gloss right over them and then all shocked and such that it applies to them. Then they double down their idiocy by trying to gen up support from people equally ignorant of the law or just anti-government in general.
So, yeah, court order, the charge will be with tax evasion if they really want to get rough.
The laws in this case exist solely to enrich very entrenched interests, specifically hotels that legally bribe (aka lobby) politicians to regulate their little part of the world to keep competition out.
What an entirely myopic view. The core of hotel regulation stems from decades of hard-learned lessons - NYC's lodging and housing laws are a mile long because they represent the tens of thousands of ways that landlords and hoteliers have discovered over centuries to fuck over their tenants.
Regulations also aren't free. As we've added to housing regulation, compliance costs have risen, and like any other industry high regulatory compliance costs discourage competition from small businesses. Regulations also ensnare unintended targets, especially when they've been iteratively built upon over decades or centuries. Like code, it is difficult to predict the full behavior of a piece of legislation over a vast and complex economy.
This puts us in a tricky balancing act. We need regulation because we've observed the many, many ways an unregulated market tends to fuck over its own customers. We also need to limit regulation in order to preserve competition and avoid people getting screwed by the law even when they aren't the intended targets of said laws.
There are, of course, malicious actors within the system on both sides. Those who seek to add regulations that have little to no public benefit, to further their own interests, and those who seek to remove necessary regulation to further theirs. The incumbent hotel industry tend to represent the former, and AirBnb represents the latter. Neither are working in the interests of the public, though they would both claim to be.
Both sides, if permitted the full extent of their desired regulations (or lack thereof) would be disastrous for the public and consumers. We, as the public, need to reign them both in, letting either side "win" would be silly and shitty.
So, yeah, court order, the charge will be with tax evasion if they really want to get rough.