Ashcroft, what's your polisci educated view on the soon to come new abuse report system?

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In short, it is a very interesting move that marks a substantial reconceptualisation of SecondLife as a whole on the part of Linden Lab that is, on the one hand, very promising for local governance, but on the other hand, raises challenges that the supporters of local governance need to meet.

For my full analysis, see here.

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Ashcroft Burnham

"We do not permit a man to rule, but the law" (Aristotle).

Ashcroft quite artificially claims that this represents a new paradigm. Nothing of the sort, for one very, very simple reason:

The Lindens did not separate powers.

They still own all the servers, but more to the point for this hifalutin governance debate, they didn't let us know, by writ, what powers they reserve unto themselves, and what they really cede to us.

Obviously, if they face real-life legal challenges and constraints on issues like gambling in the US or "ageplay" in Europe, even private servers that allow these or refuse to take abuse reports on these activities will be overidden by LL's broader RL concerns of adhering to local laws. This will become even more relevant if they do something like create a server farm in Singapore, where they are already hiring, and let Singapore decide speech laws on those servers -- which Philip explained in the BBC interview last year is exactly what he conceives of doing to get out of the Yahoo moral problem of sending dissidents to jail to keep the integrity of the service -- he'll just make that responsibility for jailing utterly outsourced.

So there are certain areas where the private island owner, as a recipient of ARs (or potentially, an ignorer of ARs) will really have power. Hate speech or racism might be one -- if someone runs a hateful and racist server, it will take a mammoth effort of outside groups to try to bring LL to task for this, in the face of their laissez-faire attitude. In the name of RP or literature or whatever, this could well be one area where people will have "latitude".

Things like shooting in safe zones -- the Lindens will yawn. But what about real-life disclosure? I was urging them in office meetings with the Governance team to keep this as part of their list of powers so that people would have some recourse against abuse.

I really don't see this as adding up to much. My tenants already ask me to deal with problems without filing any abuse reports to me or the Lindens -- they just IM me. The AR system is bugged and broken now anyway from what I gather.