How short-term vacation rentals use a decades-old internet law to dodge safety concerns

By Samantha Delouya, CNN

(CNN) — It has been just over two years since Zach Wiener awoke to the sound of glass breaking and his parents’ screams from the floor below him.

He was in an unfamiliar bedroom, staying in a short-term rental home in Sag Harbor, New York, for a weeklong family vacation with his mother, father and two younger sisters.

Believing the disturbance was due to a home invasion, Wiener jumped out of the window of his second-floor bedroom and called the police.

It wasn’t until he got to the home’s front yard that what actually happened became clear: A fire had raged through the home as the Wiener family slept. The windows had shattered from the heat of the blaze. Zach Wiener’s father, Lewis Wiener, had sustained serious burns trying to save his two daughters, Jillian and Lindsay, who were trapped in the burning home. But they didn’t survive. They were 21 and 19 years old.

For Zach Wiener, who is now 26 years old, questions about that night in August 2022 linger. If a single smoke detector in the home had made a sound, would Jillian and Lindsay have had time to escape? The house had been advertised as having smoke detectors “outside each bedroom door and inside each bedroom,” but many of the home’s smoke detectors were disconnected, contained lifeless batteries or none at all, according to a lawsuit filed by the Wiener family.

What if Vrbo, the vacation booking platform where the Wiener family had found the $8,000-per-week Sag Harbor home rental, had verified whether the home had a valid rental permit? According to the family’s lawsuit, the Sag Harbor home did not have the required local rental permits, and the home’s electrical wiring, which the family believes sparked the fire, violated multiple local safety regulations and ordinances.

Peter Miller, who owned the home with his wife, Pamela, pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal negligent homicide in August of this year. Pamela Miller pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment. Last year, however, a federal judge determined that Vrbo was not liable in a separate civil suit filed by the Wiener family, citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Vacation rentals aren’t usually mentioned in the sometimes-fractious debate surrounding Section 230, a legal provision that has shielded internet companies from liability since it was passed nearly 30 years ago. But to Zach Wiener, his family’s tragedy highlights the law’s excesses — and an often-overlooked risk of booking vacation rentals on Vrbo, Airbnb, and other vacation rental websites: These platforms may not be legally compelled to ensure that claims made by hosts who rent out their homes are true.

“Where is Vrbo’s accountability in all this?” Zach Wiener asked CNN in a recent interview. “There’s a reason we rented through a company like Vrbo. You’re assuming you’re going to get a certain level of quality by renting through this company.”

Vrbo did not respond to multiple requests for comment. However, Vrbo’s terms of service specify that it is a platform for connecting guests with vacation rental hosts and that guests are responsible for ensuring all information provided is accurate.

Airbnb did not provide a comment on the record, but the company runs a free global detector program: All Airbnb hosts with an active listing can get a free smoke and carbon monoxide detector. According to Airbnb, the company has distributed over 250,000 detectors to hosts globally as of July 2024.

What is Section 230?

Passed in the early days of the internet, defenders of Section 230 argue that the law has allowed online activity to flourish and paved the way for tech innovation, Jeff Kosseff, a professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, said.

“If there were more limited protections for internet companies, platforms would be more cautious,” Kosseff said. “That’s both good and bad. Platforms would screen their content more, but there would be fewer opportunities to post materials.”

Many of the law’s supporters assert that the goal of Section 230 is not to protect the internet platforms themselves but to protect free speech. Other supporters say it is unrealistic to require internet companies to moderate or fact-check billions of online posts, and attempting to do so would hobble tech sector growth and change how people communicate on the internet.

Lawyers for Vrbo argued that the platform bore no responsibility for the Wiener family’s tragedy.

“Section 230 shields websites like Vrbo from liability for claims based on information or communications made by third parties that are posted on their sites,” Vrbo’s lawyers wrote in a letter to US District Judge Gary Brown in February 2023.

In his decision to dismiss the Wiener family’s claims against Vrbo, Brown agreed. “That the Millers may have submitted false information that Vrbo then published has no bearing on Vrbo’s liability,” Brown wrote.

Zach Wiener said he believed the judge’s interpretation of Section 230 is too broad. His family plans to appeal the judge’s decision.

“It seems like these internet companies are being equated to a bulletin board in a coffee shop. To me, it seems obvious that if you pull a phone number off a bulletin board, you’re pulling at your own risk,” he said. “With a company like Vrbo, there’s an implied level of safety and quality you think you’re getting by going through them. And they profit from it.”

Section 230 has become a lightning rod both for Democratic and Republican lawmakers who have argued for more accountability for harmful content posted on internet platforms.

“The law has outlived its usefulness,” Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers from Washington and Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, wrote in a joint opinion column in the Wall Street Journal in May.

Earlier this year, Pallone and McMorris Rodgers jointly proposed a bill to sunset Section 230. Their efforts, and others to reform the bill, have so far proven unsuccessful.

“These companies are making so much money. and yet they’re not taking responsibility for the harms they impute on society,” said Abbey Stemler, a researcher on the sharing economy at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington. “It just feels not right.”

Expedia Group, the travel company that owns Vrbo, does not publicly share Vrbo’s financials. Overall, Expedia reported total revenue of $4.1 billion in the third quarter of 2024 and said that Vrbo had recently delivered its first full quarter of bookings growth this year.

Section 230 has proven to be a successful defense for vacation rental companies in the past. A CNN investigation published earlier this year found that Airbnb has failed to protect guests who accuse the platform’s hosts of planting hidden cameras in their vacation rentals. Airbnb prefers to quietly settle hidden camera cases, rather than notify law enforcement, according to an Airbnb employee deposition.

The investigation found that Section 230 has allowed Airbnb to distance itself from responsibility for guest safety and privacy.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for Airbnb said that hidden camera complaints are rare, but when they do occur “we take appropriate, swift action, which can include removing hosts and listings that violate the policy.”

The spokesperson added that “Airbnb’s trust and safety policies lead the vacation rental industry and include background checks on US-based hosts and guests.”

Zach Wiener said he hopes his family’s story will help raise awareness of the legal shield sometimes provided to short-term rental platforms by Section 230.

“What I hope will come out of it is that Vrbo changes their business practices,” he said. “My family suffered an unspeakable tragedy. If anything, I hope this never happens to anyone ever again.”

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