Raph has been following this story for a long time, and he links to an excellent analysis over on PlayNoEvil. Short form: Second Life is no longer accepting ads for virtual casinos in their space (which, of course, traffic LindenBucks, which can be exchanged for real simoleans with relative ease). The official link from Linden Labs is here.
As Raph notes, the comments thread is particularly intriguing, with many people channelling Martin Neimollar to say “First, they came for the ageplayers, and then the casinos…”. The fact that this meme was repeated several times was significant, as it points to players concerned that their way of life is threatened.
From my vantage point, it seems clear that Second Life is at a crossroads, forced to choose between two visions of its future that were once compatible, but are increasingly less so. On one hand, you have their core market, which is interested in the do-anywhere, build-anything promise of freedom that has been central to Second Life since they launched – and being a free speech zealot myself, I sympathize with them, even as I fully admit the SL experience is not for me. But make no mistake, it’s a niche market.
The other vision is the viewpoint that embraces Second Life as a legitimate replacement to the World Wide Web – Web 3.0, or Web 3D, or Web 3D.0, or some other damnable trendy mnemonic. While Linden seeks to mollify their base as best they can, they’ve been moving aggressively as they can to pursue this, because, of course, it’s the vision that’s not niche, and is the one that’s most likely to get them bought out by Google and make everyone involved into millionaires. You already see things moving in that direction – logging into Second Life right now is a far different experience than logging on even a year ago, and feels a lot like logging onto the web in 1997: porn, casinos, spam, corporate ’sites’ which do little other than earn online ‘cred’ and unnecessary, bloated multimedia capabilities. It’s all still rough, but a lot will improve as developers figure out how to build for the medium – much as our understanding of what a good web site is has changed in the last 10 years.
The lynchpin of this vision, of course, is the LindenBuck, which is exchangable for real bucks, thus making actual business for either in-game or out-of-game goods and services possible. Unfortunately, once real cash gets involved, and a certain threshold of success is met, you have to start worrying about the law, which is problematic, since different jurisdictions have very different legal requirements. But you can’t claim that you’re going to replace the Web without automatically inheriting most of the regulatory burden that the Web is currently under. The most interesting part of the Linden press release is this snippet:
Linden Lab is committed to keeping Second Life a place of openness and opportunity. We plan to implement features that will enable Residents to optionally confirm aspects of each other’s identity, including age and jurisdictions. Hopefully, these features will help Residents as they conform to their own local laws.
Translation: conforming to local laws is ultimately your problem, not ours. (Corollary: unless you’re big enough to hire legal help to navigate the mess, don’t bother). Which makes total sense if you see yourself as Web 3.0 – no one expected Netscape to be liable for the web sites people made back in 1997. Here’s Linden confirming that’s their stance:
“There are millions of registered accounts and tens of millions of different objects in Second Life, there is simply no way for us to monitor content prospectively even if we wanted to,” Yoon said. “That would be a harder task than pre-monitoring all email sent through Yahoo Mail or Gmail, and no one expects those services to prevent all possible use of email for illegal activity.”Ginsu Yoon, VP of Business Affairs and former general counsel at Linden Lab.
Will the Feds see it this way? It’s genuinely hard to say. The primary difference between Linden Labs and the real web is that the latter is decentralized, whereas Second Life is not. If you’re a centralized service that is used primarily for a ‘questionable’ activity, it’s hard to avoid legal liability – just ask Napster. This is made dicier since Linden is probably making a fair amount of coin from these businesses on the side selling land and exchanging LindenBucks.
Second Life needs desperately to not be seen as the place for porn and casinos, at least until they can decentralize themselves (by, for example, making the server open source as they did the client). They need more legitimate, ‘clean’ content that people talk about outside the game space. They need an Amazon or an eBay. They’d even be helped by having a HampsterDance, or an AYB, or a Mahir Cagri. They need something that threatens a mention on Letterman. Until they do, they will be defined by their racier content, just as Napster was defined by it’s illegal file sharing, even though the tool technically could exchange legal music clips just dandy.
Which brings us back to the original story – interestingly, they aren’t banning casinos in Second Life – just the advertising of them. Clearly, they’re still trying to have a very free and open world, while trying to avoid undue scrutiny as best they can. Still, for the hardcore SL purists who love Second Life for the vision of unadulterated freedom – get used to change, because I’m sure that more is coming.
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