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Oct 18, 2005

Comments

1.

My first thoughts were of Jeffery R. Cooper's "The Cyberfrontier", and then of Chris Crawford's Dragon Speech, both of which suggest that cyberspace as a whole, including but not limited to virtual worlds, is a frontier, abound in the lawlessness and uncertainty that characterized the romantic lore of the Wild West.

Personally, while I agree that the "threat to the meat" argument holds water, what if such a threat is dissipated? For instance, if the physical location of a client cannot be determined by the futuristic equivalent of the IP address. What if computer networks arise that somehow defeat the ability to control them by placing a finger on the power button? If meat governments continue to attempt to control cyberspace by threatening wetware or hardware, I think that will be the next step.

Granted, I submit this is a little too futuristic to consider presently as a possibility... but it could turn out this way, and probably will, eventually.

2.

Unfortunately didn't make it to SoP this year, but I did catch most of the webcasts - there was definitely some good stuff. I agree with Joshua's assessment that the "great debate", however, never got to the core of the matter, since both sides were essentially dancing around common ground. I remember Dan musing about virtual world sovereignty at SoP II, and the argument didn't get very far then either. The reasons are the ones mentioned in the post, and seemed not to be contested by either side:

  1. Governments in the actual world can and do regulate behaviour related to virtual worlds and other cybercommunities - in large part because the participants, owners or the physical infrastructure tend to be located within their territorial jurisdiction. China provides some good examples of such abilities being exercised.
  2. Such regulation may well be justified in certain circumstances - this is why David (Johnson?) explicitly tried to exclude child porn from the discussion. Last year, Dan seemed to argue this wouldn't necessarily be the case, but this year I don't remember anyone arguing for the absolute sovereignty of virtual worlds.
  3. Territorial governments commonly allow non-governmental communities/associations/organizations in the actual world to regulate certain types of behaviour within certain limits. For the most part, this is forbearance on the part of the territorial sovereign, not a recognition of some overriding sovereignty in such normative orders.
If we are going to talk about the existing regulatory context, the real question is about what the limits in (3) are or should be. How much forbearance should territorial governments excercise with respect to virtual worlds? Unfortunately, most of the "debate" was spent rehashing old arguments about jurisdiction/difficulty of regulation/consent of the governed, etc. and didn't really deal with the limits of forbearance in any detail. In the end, I felt the same frustration Joshua did with the panel - and it's too bad, considering the people who were assembled there - it had some real potential.

3.

I guess it doesn't add much to say this, but I agree with Peter and Josh.

Another point which I made in the virtual property workshop and in my Planes of Power paper is that you're likely not going to exclude the state from VW regulation issues in practical terms today, because you don't see something like LambdaMoo "democracy" in contemporary VWs -- you see the potential hot points being issues of conflicts between owners and users, or users and users. Putting aside the mainstream worlds, the dev/player conflicts are a major issues in Second Life (as they were in LambdaMOO!) So to talk of succession seems a little inapt, as we're likely to see (indeed are seeing) that where things get serious, people seem to have no qualms about litigating or exercising technological power to do what they want to do.

And yes -- despite the threats of bodily harm, I was more struck by how much the sides had in common than in how they differed. (Well maybe not too surprising -- I actually use an earlier statement by Wu as a voice on the Post/Johnson side in the Planes of Power paper.) The concession by the Goldsmith side that baseball games are separate social spheres with their own form of legal ordering seemed to place both groups firmly in the middle ground. Like Peter said, the tricky issue is the exact shape of that middle ground when it comes to VWs and online communities generally.

4.

Sorry, a random question as I haven't read up on this and have been away for a while:

Has anyone analyze this from the angle of what power existing governance institutions are willing to cede? As space and Antartica was a contested territory, how does the development of governance there apply to the governance of cyberspace worlds?

Frank

5.

The downside of ceding government control is that what's forfeited are not only governmental restrictions but also governmental protections for consumers.

Take a look at Unggi Yoon's post about the South Korean government's crackdown on Korean MMOG's. My gut feeling is that the reason something similar hasn't happened in the U.S. is because MMOG's here haven't penetrated the mainstream.

6.

Joshua Fairfield>meat sovereigns CAN govern cybercommunities by virtue of their physical control over bodies and servers, but that merely makes us ask whether they OUGHT to.

This is what I was trying to get to in my opening speech. Governments gain their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, however that's what we have in virtual worlds, too. What's more, virtual world authorities don't have armies to back them up, so if anything they're even more legitimate than real-world governments.

The counter-argument seemed to be based on the fact that at the moment we can still track down where a virtual world's servers are in the real world. In other words, geography matters. Even given that this is so (which I dispute), the first virtual world to have its servers at sea or in outer space would seem to have a claim for self-governance.

I wish I'd read in full the papers Cory gave out the day before at the workshop. One of them was Tim Wu's response to Johnson & Post's original paper (in which they argued that all of Cyberspace should be sovereign). Tim's paper said (I'm paraphrasing here) that this was much too broad a field, but that their arguments did perhaps apply to MUDs.

Richard

7.

Richard -- I think what you're looking for is this:

Allan Stein and Timothy Wu, both skeptics of separate Internet jurisdiction generally, have also seemed willing to concede that tight-knit communities embedded in fictive technologies have more cognizable jurisdictional claims. (Stein 1998; Wu 1999). For instance, Wu suggested it was “outrageous” that an “online ticket purchase becomes governed by some weird law of Cyberspace.” (Wu 1999: 1196-1202). Yet he admitted that “for a group of MUD users whose environment is entirely virtual and who perhaps see their physical lives as distinctly secondary, allowing this group of people to make their own rules does not seem outrageous.” (ibid.) Wu stated that MUDs are properly associated with “a thick Cyberspace sovereignty.” (ibid.).

Here are the two sources:

Wu, T. (1999) ‘Application-Centered Internet Analysis’ in Virginia Law Review 85:1163-1204.

Stein, A. (1998) ‘The Unexceptional Problem of Jurisdiction in Cyberspace’ in The International Lawyer 32: 1167.

8.

Peter Edelmann>Last year, Dan seemed to argue this wouldn't necessarily be the case, but this year I don't remember anyone arguing for the absolute sovereignty of virtual worlds.

I certainly had that in mind when we were in the discussion part of the debate. All that talk about states declaring war on states which they feel threatened by was predicated on the assumption that virtual worlds were being treated as states.

The child pornography aspect did get a mention, but I'm not sure it was covered in as much depth as it should have been as it's a highly emotive subject and no-one wants to give the impression that they're in favour of it. Basically, though, the argument went something like this:

1) Our definition of what is child pornography is not shared by some other real-world countries. Children can marry at 12 in some parts of the world, for example.
2) If we regard another state as enough of a threat then we go to war on it. This is what we could do to a virtual world if it was threatening our real-world state.
3) War is a drastic solution, and there are other measures that can be taken. For example, some European countries (eg. Germany, UK) make it an offence to have sex with a child even in countries where having sex with a child is not illegal.

The way I see it, virtual world developers can and should have absolute sovereignty over their creations. If players don't like being subject to it, they play a different virtual world with nicer laws (emigration is far easier in virtual worlds than in the real world, and social capital is no longer as hard to take with you as it once was). If governments don't like it, they make it an offence for their citizens to visit the virtual world. If they really don't like it, they go to war with that world, probably in the first instance by using real-world legal means in the country hosting the servers.

As a hypothetical example, let's say that a South Korean virtual world launches in which the consumption of alcohol is depicted widely and positively. The government of the day in the USA decides to ban access to the game to people under 21, but doesn't care what mature people get up to when they visit it. The government of the day in Saudi Arabia decides to ban all its citizens from visiting it, because of religious objections to its subject matter. The government of the day in North Korea is in domestic turmoil and decides to embark on a foreign adventure to distract the attention of the masses. It points to the corruption of the South Korean game, and demands that it be taken down. For obscure tax reasons, the game's servers are in Ireland, and the Irish government of the day refuses to accede to the North Korean request. North Korea launches denial of service attacks on the servers, which manage to survive, but a week later there's a suspicious fire in a Dublin data centre that burns the game's hardware to a crisp. Political crisis in North Korea is averted, but the repercussions in Ireland are only just beginning.

This example would work whether or not the developers of the game in question had sovereignty over it. The issue only matters in the decision of the Irish government not to accede to the North Korean request. Now there are many possible reasons, including dislike of North Korea, liking of the game's tax revenues, strong ties with South Korea, representations from the Americans who play it, and so on. These are the arguments that would work if the virtual world didn't have sovereignty.

But what if the Irish government had simply said that it recognised the independence of any virtual world with servers on its territory? The practical result of this particular incident would be the same, but in more general terms such a recognition would release virtual world developers from the creative constraints imposed by having to satisfy all governments in all territories all the time. What was, before, a question of obeying laws imposed by non-players for ill-conceived reasons, suddenly becomes merely an issue of foreign policy. Taxation on in-game earnings becomes an issue of capital transfer. Content is freed from creative constraints.

And if you do create a world that features child pornography for no good reason (eg. it's not a world created for police officers to use for anti-pornography training exercises), you can still expect to have your players real-world arrested for accessing it, and you, too, for distributing it, just as you could if, say, you started beaming such stuff to the USA from a Caribbean island.

Because reality always wins, all that sovereignty buys you is a slightly higher barrier on being legislated against. However, that slight raising against legislation is a much higher raising against self-censorship: people will be able to experiment creatively in ways at that at present are too much of a risk.

I want virtual worlds to be sovereign because I think we'll get better virtual worlds - and thus a better real world - as a result.

Richard

9.

I don't know what "sex with a child" means in a virtual world. Does it include adults using child-like avatars or only children using adult avatars? What about virtual worlds where people intentionally hide their real identity? Should the age of the user have any meaning?

If the parents of a child pressed felony charges, I see no difference with a sovereign virtual world. Clearly the parents will not charge the avatar -- they will charge the real world user -- so extradition does not come into play. If the real world courts recognize the mores of the virtual world, that's all that matters, right? That seems orthogonal to the idea of sovereignty.

10.

Ken Fox>I don't know what "sex with a child" means in a virtual world.

Me neither, and I don't want to know, either!

I did say that it's a highly emotive subject and no-one wants to give the impression that they're in favour of it...

>If the real world courts recognize the mores of the virtual world, that's all that matters, right?

Just ask yourself what would happen in the real world if another country started broadcasting child pornography to a neighbour, or promoted a child sex tourist industry. Would a real-world state just wring its hands and say how awful it was but the other country was within its rights to do it? No, they wouldn't - they'd take action to stop it. However, the action they took would be within the framework of international law (one would hope) and would be at a foreign office level, not at a court level.

USA courts have no jurisdiction over the Bahamas; why should they have jurisdiction over Lineage?

Richard

11.

Wouldn't a country first file charges and then request extradition of the person? Sovereignty means the ability to say "no, you can't have him -- he's ours."

Can a virtual world ever expect to have the power to say no? Yes, for avatars, performances, in-game currency, and all the other virtual (intellectual property) stuff. If a virtual world's power extends to real world users, that means the virtual world has become a real world.

This could happen with Kurzweil's spiritual machines or with Jeff Hawkin's intelligent machines, but I don't see any chance of it with current humans. People can't lay across a border claiming protection of their heads based on the citizenship of their feet.

Perhaps a virtual world could have strong privacy guarantees that, when combined with sovereignty, protects a real world player. I doubt any virtual world really wants that though since it severely limits their ability to affect the real world, for example, by collecting payments or suing for damages.

12.

Richard > Because reality always wins, all that sovereignty buys you is a slightly higher barrier on being legislated against. However, that slight raising against legislation is a much higher raising against self-censorship: people will be able to experiment creatively in ways at that at present are too much of a risk.

I think we may be using different definitions of sovereignty. From Black's Law Dictionary:

Sovereign: A person, body, or state in which independent and supreme authority is vested [...]
If the virtual world is subject to laws from some source other than itself, it is not sovereign. Sovereignty is the reason that international treaties and European Union directives have to be ratified by individual states before taking effect. What you are talking about is forbearance - you are asking states to choose not to exercise their power over virtual worlds and their participants. Two very different things. The claim for sovereignty says territorial states never have the right to enforce their laws in a virtual world themselves. Forbearance says that there are good reasons for states to leave virtual worlds be, usually subject to certain limits (eg: no child porn, etc.).

Richard> USA courts have no jurisdiction over the Bahamas; why should they have jurisdiction over Lineage?

No reason they should, unless there is some connection to the US, such as:

  1. US citizens/residents are owners/participants in Lineage (in which case, the US can stop/regulate them doing so - see China).
  2. Lineage servers are in the US and/or use infrastructure in the US. (in which case, the US can regulate/deny access to that infrastructure - again, see China).
  3. (1) or (2) are true of some country with which the US has an agreement with respect to certain types of behaviour (eg: treaty on international crime, terrorism, or what have you...).

Now, try to imagine a VW where one of these things isn't true with respect to at least one State in the actual world. None of the mainstream VWs (WoW, Lineage et al.) even come close, and I can't think of a single example that does, even marginally.

13.

I'm pondering the idea of an individual who has citizenship in a virtual world and no meat ones. Is it even possible? What about organizations unaffiliated with a meat government taking up some kind of membership to a virtual world?

14.

Ken Fox>Wouldn't a country first file charges and then request extradition of the person?

Extradition is for when someone has broken the laws of country A then fled to country B. It's not for when people have broken the laws of country A in country B, but not broken the laws of country B. If I published a book in the UK that blasphemed, I could be arrested here. If I fled to the USA, where blasphemy isn't illegal, I couldn't be extradited.

For a real-world country to ask a virtual world to extradite a player, that player must have committed their crime in the real world. Fleeing to the virtual world will not remove them from the real world. A sympathetic virtual world might ban entry to the criminal, or help locate the player in the real world, but it's the police of their real-world location that will have to arrest them if the original country wants them back.

Virtual-world citizenship is dual citizenship with a real-world country. As you say, only AIs can have citizenship only of the virtual world.

Richard

15.

Peter Edenlann>I think we may be using different definitions of sovereignty.

That's quite possible, since IANAL.

>If the virtual world is subject to laws from some source other than itself, it is not sovereign.

OK, well I don't want virtual worlds to be subject to laws from some source other than itself, so I guess that means I am advocating sovereignty as you define it.

>What you are talking about is forbearance - you are asking states to choose not to exercise their power over virtual worlds and their participants.

Well in that case, the only sovereign state in the real world is the USA, because it chooses not to exercise its power over other states. It could, if it wanted, create a set of laws for other countries and conquer them if they didn't obey those laws.

>The claim for sovereignty says territorial states never have the right to enforce their laws in a virtual world themselves. Forbearance says that there are good reasons for states to leave virtual worlds be, usually subject to certain limits (eg: no child porn, etc.).

I want sovereignty. That might in practice come down to forebearance (at least while the servers of virtual worlds can be pinned down to one physical location), but in law I want it to be sovereignty. The decision to harm virtual worlds that real-world governments disapprove of would have to be taken at a governmental level on a case-by-case basis, not in some low court by a bored judge.

>US citizens/residents are owners/participants in Lineage (in which case, the US can stop/regulate them doing so - see China).

Yes, that's fine. The US is regulating its own citizens (who happen to be joint citizens - but not the only citizens - of the virtual world).

>Lineage servers are in the US and/or use infrastructure in the US. (in which case, the US can regulate/deny access to that infrastructure - again, see China).

This is why the EU is trying to get the Internet domain name system handed over to the UN. The USA could shut down the Internet to the rest of the world if it wanted, because the root domain name servers are in the USA.

The physical location of virtual worlds' servers means that countries can deny access to them even if they ARE sovereign, though, in the same way that they can close their physical borders. If Italy decides it doesn't want people going to Vatican City or San Marino, then no-one goes to those places - even though they're not part of Italy.

>Now, try to imagine a VW where one of these things isn't true with respect to at least one State in the actual world.

A VW with its servers on a ship on the high seas, or on a satellite in orbit, or distributed across the PCs of all its players would not be subject to the RL control of any state. A VW located somewhere like the Cayman Islands, which knows the value of offering a haven to international banking laws, might be able to have effective control too.

Also, if VWs are mainstream enough for long enough, they might be able to muster enough votes among the population for some real-world territory to be given over to them. If 35m (out of 48m) South Koreans have accounts in virtual worlds, it's not unreasonable to suppose that in, oh, let's say 50 years (but you can have as many as you want) there's a hectare of Seoul set aside for VWs that is adminstered by the players of those VWs. Now, the VWs have a RW physical presence, albeit in an area with no RW physical population. Would that be OK?

Richard

16.

Richard> Extradition is for when someone has broken the laws of country A then fled to country B. It's not for when people have broken the laws of country A in country B, but not broken the laws of country B.

I understand. Generally the act has to be a crime in both countries, but that depends on the extradition treaty. However, you are not thinking of the victim, or the place of the crime. The victim seeks justice through his or her own country -- even if the perpetrator never entered the country.

The situation where virtual world sovereignty becomes meaningful is when a victim pursues justice with a real world court, but the virtual world refuses to hand over evidence. I think a virtual world can achieve that. Unfortunately, if the real world "connects the dots" to figure out all the other real world people involved, the virtual world can be completely circumvented. It's not that it doesn't have sovereignty -- it's just that the virtual world is impotent when dealing with the real.

By the way, real world territory given to a virtual world simply makes the virtual world a very, very tiny real world entity. It doesn't impact this debate at all unless real world users *physically* travel to this tiny place to use the virtual world.

17.

Richard > the high seas, or on a satellite in orbit, or distributed across the PCs of all its players would not be subject to the RL control of any state
Both the high seas and space are regulated by international treaties (that's why you won't see many ships without national flags). As for distributed PCs - do you think the Chinese [or any other] government is incapable of filtering a P2P application?

> A VW located somewhere like the Cayman Islands, which knows the value of offering a haven to international banking laws, might be able to have effective control too.
Do you think the Cayman Islands would grant you sovereignty? With no conditions? Their banks have no such thing - the regulations are arguably somewhat more lax than elsewhere, but there are certainly rules about banking. Even if there weren't, do you think the government of the Cayman Islands would say that they didn't have the right or power to enact such rules if the need arose? Not at all. That is forbearance - a choice not to regulate something which an entity could otherwise regulate.

> Now, the VWs have a RW physical presence, albeit in an area with no RW physical population. Would that be OK?
Is it a virtual world if it has no RW participants? According to your definition in DVW, not so much...

> Well in that case, the only sovereign state in the real world is the USA, because it chooses not to exercise its power over other states. It could, if it wanted, create a set of laws for other countries and conquer them if they didn't obey those laws.
While the American government's grasp of international law is at times somewhat tenuous, they do generally recognize (or at least pay lip service to) the sovereignty of (most) other nations. However, you are right that nations in which the US [or anyone else] enforces laws that take precedence over the laws of the nation in question is not sovereign, at least not de facto (de facto [of fact] as opposed to de jure [of law] - eg. many countries recognize China's de jure sovereignty over Taiwan, but the Taiwanese government is the de facto sovereign).
Even if your claim for VW sovereignty was legitimate de jure (which I would guess no existing State is going to recognize any time soon), what kind of VW is going to have de facto sovereignty without the acquiescence [forbearance] of the State(s) in which its infrastructure/participants are located? If your VW's infrastructure and its participants have to be located outside any existing State's jurisdiction to do so, aren't you just creating another State in the actual world? Even assuming you could pull such a thing off, I don't really see the practical implications for most VWs.

I do think, however, that you make a strong argument for some kind of forbearance. These are the kinds of arguments States will listen to, and may eventually get you some kind of special status for VWs under the legal regime of one State or another, even if it is the Cayman Islands. My sense from things you have said elsewhere is that you in fact do want the protection of government for your virtual world. You would like government to help enforce your contracts and your ownership of the VW, protect your physical infrastructure, ensure the physical safety of participants, etc. What you are resistant to is government interference in the workings of the VW on the other side of the login screen (although even here, you are willing to accept certain limitations - qv. child porn). In practical terms for existing VWs, I think it might be more fruitful for us to discuss what kinds of forbearance you would like to get from governments - what are the limits you are willing to accept, and what they mean for VWs.

18.

Peter> As for distributed PCs - do you think the Chinese [or any other] government is incapable of filtering a P2P application?

You raise an interesting point about emigration -- why do you expect virtual worlds to have special status here with respect to real worlds?

The Chinese government certainly has the right to prevent entry to a virtual world from Chinese soil. The virtual world however should have the right to be free of interference. (All of the human denizens however have dual citizenship with the real world, and inhabit the real world at all times, so they are not immune from interference.)

19.

>> Now, the VWs have a RW physical presence, albeit in an area with no RW physical population. Would that be OK?
>Is it a virtual world if it has no RW participants? According to your definition in DVW, not so much...

I think what he meant was that the servers would be housed in a piece of real world land owned by the virtual world, and that everything else happens as it does now.

===
There's an underlying assumption here that sovereignty has to be testable before it's valid, and that doesn't seem to be the case. What makes a privately owned island or an Indian reservation sovereign land? (I don't know if such islands ARE sovereign, but I saw a TV show in which such an island supposedly was.)

If you happened to be Bill Gates and decided to give the federal government an ungodly amount of money for a chunk of land that no one else gave a damn about (somehow) in exchange for the right of sovereignty, wouldn't that work?

No, you can't enforce it, but does that mean you aren't sovereign?

20.

Peter Edelmann>Both the high seas and space are regulated by international treaties

They may well be regulated by them, but then so are actual countries. Treaties aren't incompatible with sovereignty.

>As for distributed PCs - do you think the Chinese [or any other] government is incapable of filtering a P2P application?

It depends on the application.

>Do you think the Cayman Islands would grant you sovereignty?

If I offered them enough money, sure. The USA bought Alaska from Russia; why wouldn't the Cayman Islands sell 10 square metres of wasteland to a virtual world?

>Even if your claim for VW sovereignty was legitimate de jure (which I would guess no existing State is going to recognize any time soon), what kind of VW is going to have de facto sovereignty without the acquiescence [forbearance] of the State(s) in which its infrastructure/participants are located?

One in outer space or on the high seas or distributed across many countries. By the forebearance of which state would a platform at sea be operating?

>If your VW's infrastructure and its participants have to be located outside any existing State's jurisdiction to do so, aren't you just creating another State in the actual world?

I don't think they need to have a real-world geographic territory to qualify as a state, but if you insist on their having one then OK, let's give them a nominal one. A square inch of the UN compound in New York would work for me.

>Even assuming you could pull such a thing off, I don't really see the practical implications for most VWs.

I believe there are practical implications (because they'd be more able to manage their own affairs), but even without the practical there is a very strong theoretical implication. States only have legitimacy through the consent of the governed ("we, the people"); virtual worlds have exactly the same legitimacy, except they don't have an army to deal with miscreants (and can therefore claim even greater legimtimacy, as they involve no coercion among their citizens).

>My sense from things you have said elsewhere is that you in fact do want the protection of government for your virtual world.

Well, it's not so much that I want the protection of the government for my world as wanting the government not to offer protection to people I dismiss from my world. As I said at State of Play I, I don't want to send IGE to jail for selling stuff from my world (not that they do!); rather, I want to be able to cancel their accounts without their being able to send me to jail.

>What you are resistant to is government interference in the workings of the VW on the other side of the login screen

Basically, yes.

>In practical terms for existing VWs, I think it might be more fruitful for us to discuss what kinds of forbearance you would like to get from governments - what are the limits you are willing to accept, and what they mean for VWs.

In practical terms, yes, I agree. The Great Debate was not, however, about whether virtual worlds WILL have sovereignty, but whether they SHOULD have it. I believe they SHOULD have it, but I don't see that they're GOING to have it any time soon, so yes, your suggestion makes sense and is the way we should proceed. It just wasn't what we were debating, though.

Richard

21.

Richard said, A VW with its servers on a ship on the high seas, or on a satellite in orbit, or distributed across the PCs of all its players would not be subject to the RL control of any state.

What you want to do is site your servers in The Principality of Sealand (see also HavenCo which is itself sited on Sealand). Quoting from their website:

Sealand was founded as a sovereign Principality in 1967 in international waters, six miles off the eastern shores of Britain. The island fortress is conveniently situated from 65 to 100 miles from the coasts of France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. The official language of Sealand is English and the Sealand Dollar has a fixed exchange rate of one U.S. dollar. ... [Sealand's location is at] Roughs Tower, an island fortress created in World War II by Britain and subsequently abandoned to the jurisdiction of the High Seas. The independence of Sealand was upheld in a 1968 British court decision where the judge held that Roughs Tower stood in international waters and did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.
If there's a place on the planet for easy sovereignty for a virtual world, that's probably it. Sovereignty requires recognition from other countries as well, and Sealand would seem to have one of the better claims that other countries would have to recognize if it came to it.

Richard also said, I believe there are practical implications (because they'd be more able to manage their own affairs), but even without the practical there is a very strong theoretical implication.

I agree that this could be an amazing pracitcal and theoretical experiment -- but I also know that no VW existing today has the tools needed to be self-governing. A few (e.g. The River) have made serious attempts at this... but this is one area in which MMOGs lag far behind other online communities (and in which online communities are millennia behind the real world). We have no methods, tools, or techniques for definition, delegation, or transferral of powers, for holding powers jointly, for defining civil and property rights, or for supporting societal units such as the family in any form -- to name just a few tip-of-the-iceberg concerns.

We are quite literally in the stone age when it comes to self-regulation of groups, having no tools or experience with anything beyond the local tribe, and no ultimate recourse available other than secession or death (banning, in our case). You could run the VW as a kingdom of course, a complete autocracy, but I guarantee you this will not last. Your "citizens" are too used to modern ways, with the expectation of having a voice at some point regarding the disposition of their lives, whether virtual or real.

States only have legitimacy through the consent of the governed ("we, the people"); virtual worlds have exactly the same legitimacy, except they don't have an army to deal with miscreants (and can therefore claim even greater legimtimacy, as they involve no coercion among their citizens).

States' sovereignty devolves from the people - both those governed and other states' recognition. A server in the Caymans or the Channel Islands won't get you this recognition; you're going to need something more robust in the face of international claims to the contrary. Sealand might do it for you.

22.

Richard> Well, it's not so much that I want the protection of the government for my world as wanting the government not to offer protection to people I dismiss from my world.

That has nothing to do with sovereignty.

Obviously you are the sovereign power in the virtual world if you can remove someone from it.

You are asking another sovereign power to sign a treaty of non-enforcement of their laws if the crime takes place in your world. I doubt any power would voluntarily give up that right. It's even less likely with virtual worlds because they have a very fluid concept of being inside the world -- they nest inside a real world so people are literally in two places at once.

Why should the real world subordinate itself to your virtual one?

23.

Why should the real world subordinate itself to your virtual one?

Recognition of the value of economic trade between the real and the virtual?

24.

Michael Chui wrote:

Why should the real world subordinate itself to your virtual one?

Recognition of the value of economic trade between the real and the virtual?

They don't need to subordinate their authority to a virtual world to take advantage of that economic trade. The two are unrelated.

--matt

25.

Ken Fox>That has nothing to do with sovereignty.

The context of the remark was in response to Peter's suggestion that I want the protection of government for virtual worlds. He was pointing out an apparent contradiction (I want sovereignty, but I also want benefits that only come with not having sovereignty); I was answering by saying that I don't want those benefits, so long as other people can't use some equivalent to them to get at me.

>You are asking another sovereign power to sign a treaty of non-enforcement of their laws if the crime takes place in your world. I doubt any power would voluntarily give up that right.

I'm not asking them to sign any such treaty. If, in the real world, a country makes a law that forbids something which is not forbidden in another country, the second country doesn't go asking them to sign a treaty of non-enforcement. What the second country allows or disallows is its own business. If the first country objects, it can wait until its own citizens return home then arrest them if they broke their country's laws in that second country. If the second country is a pariah, it could go to war on it. None of this says anything about having to sign treaties of non-enforcement.

>Why should the real world subordinate itself to your virtual one?

Why should a real world country subordinate itself to another real world country?

It's not subordination anyway, it's a peer thing. The UK has 240 times the population of Iceland, but both countries are equal in terms of international law. WoW has 16 times the population of Iceland, and if it were granted statehood would similarly be equal.

Richard

26.

So much energy is being expended in this discussion about keeping meat sovereigns' paws off virtual worlds and resisting their overreach or subordination, that no attention is being paid to *the kinds of governments or types of governance the people set up in virtual worlds within the world*. That's the scary part, because that's the stuff that will then push outwards against virtuality and begin to impact actuality someday, when it really gets going.

When I read Joshua Fairfield say (quoting, says, Robert Cover):

"what's going on online right now is 'jurisgenerative' -- I think, just as you all do about meat sovereigns and their hold over virtual worlds -- but is that RIGHT? Is this good law that is being generated?

So often these "emerging concepts of virtual property" and "ideas about free speech and public discourse" are setting norms that go *significantly below* the international norms that meat sovereigns have hammered out in the last 50 years often through years and years of UN debates and following world wars.

For instance, many would like to see Art. 19 apply in Second Life, but the company who leases the servers, Linden Lab, is hardly going to start enforcing the free speech of even a European-style Article 19 within the confines of what is esesntially a private club, even if it is now calling itself a common carrier. A "bill of rights" was specifically rejected as even a topic for the "features voting" page at secondlife.com

To take but on example of many, in RL, you can copy down something someone says and tell it to another person -- openly or surreptitiously, in a cut-and-paste email, in a telephone conversation. It might be considered unethical, but no one will fire you from your job or expel you from your housing over it.

In SL, it is unlawful under the TOS to disclos a notecarded (i.e. copied) conversation you've had with one person to another person or to the SL forums -- without that first person's consent. This is like taking the concept of the copyright of the letter belongs to the author of the letter -- and extending it two ways and further.

Violation of this "jurisgenerated norm for a virtual world" then can get you banned from your second life for 3 days, losing you income on your business, possibly even leading to loss of your residence.

All sorts of "norms" like this are getting started, getting traction, and being jealously and sometimes even viciously defended by legions of fanboyz, but actually, they go significantly below the rights and freedoms that have already arduously been established in the meat world by the meat sovereigns everybody is so ready to scorn because of their undue control over cyberspace.

Julian says, "we're seeing online communitites develop standards that are just slightly akimbo from the generic realspace common law." Oh? But where are the courts and the precedent system, the independent bar, the judicial branch, the independent judges -- oh, everything that could make up the rule of law?

These institutions are only beginning to appear -- but they have a significant obstacle to face --the overwhelming, nearly unassailable power of the "executive branch" or the game companies or platform providers themselves.

Or let's take some of the fantastic possibilities for fraud within virtual worlds that no inworld bodies have begun to cope with, and which lie outside of TOS regulations. A mall builder could cut and paste a mall for a new customer, that is merely a copy of a mall he made for an old customer - and in a huge virtual world, who is to know it is not original work? A seller could check off "sell objects with land" in an expensive land deal, and the buyer, unable to tell if all objects are affected, cannot realize until after the purchase that some of the items didn't sell and didn't therefore pass into the buyer's possession. Or a person can sell a $25,000 poker table inside a box labled $50,000 poker table, and no one can do a thing about it. These are the frustrating cases that grow out of the very fabric of the virtual, copyable world where responsibility is so easy to evade.

It's not just that there are no armies or powers to enforce, it's that the phenomena itself, and the MMORPG gaming culture that spawns some of the "jurisgenesis" are new enough and different enough to engender the need for new responses, and hence new law.

But there's no good reason to throw out centuries of existing human experience in jurisprudence in the meat world, however. To say there is no sovereignty and no property values inside a virtual world (by undermining these values outside it) is to needlessly admit lawlessness, corruption, and crime into virtual worlds.

Just because it's international, there's no reason to go to the lowest common denominator on what free speech or property rights or freedom of assembly should be in a virtual world, scorning American achievements in these rights and ushering in Chinese or Russian notions of these rights, which subordinate them to powerful centralized governments or collectives loyal to the government.

27.

Richard> If the first country objects, it can wait until its own citizens return home then arrest them if they broke their country's laws in that second country.

This is the crux of the problem and I wish I could explain it better. A virtual person lives simultaneously in at least two countries at once. People don't return home -- they never leave.

Here's an example.

Alice and Bob live in the U.S. and play WoW using the accounts Ally and Bobby respectively.

Ally threatens and harrasses Bobby.

If WoW were an independent power, Bobby could choose to deal with Ally in the WoW courts (or the WoW Inquisition). However, Bob could also go after Alice in the U.S. courts.

If WoW resided on a tiny private island and formed its own real world government, the situation would not change.

If Alice lived in Argentina and Bob in Brazil, the situation would not change, except that Bob might have a harder time convincing his courts to handle it. Alice may not be able to travel freely in Brazil anymore.

You can't eliminate this choice unless the real world submits to the virtual (or vice versa). Real world governments solve nested regional control this way (city subordinate to territory, territory subordinate to country).

Prokofy> But there's no good reason to throw out centuries of existing human experience in jurisprudence in the meat world, however. To say there is no sovereignty and no property values inside a virtual world (by undermining these values outside it) is to needlessly admit lawlessness, corruption, and crime into virtual worlds.

That doesn't follow. Virtual worlds may be properly nested within a real world government. They would not be sovereign states, but certainly would have rule of law and property values.

I agree with your other points. Do all problems derive from the fact that a virtual world is completely owned by the company owning the servers and client software? Would a P2P virtual world have the same trouble?

28.

Richard > the high seas, or on a satellite in orbit, or distributed across the PCs of all its players
Richard > why wouldn't the Cayman Islands sell 10 square metres of wasteland to a virtual world?
Mike Sellers > Sealand might do it for you.
[etc, etc...]

I think these are fascinating thought experiments (and debated ad infinitum among international law types) - perhaps one or more of them could even be pulled off in the future. Not to repeat Ken's point, but my question earlier about whether it is a virtual world if it has no participants was not idle or irrelevant. In any of these scenarios - where will the participants (their meat, RW bodies) be located? There are 2 possibilities, from what I can see:

  1. The participants physically transport their bodies to Sealand/one square mile in Korea/platform on the high seas/outer space, etc. whenever they want to connect to the VW;
  2. The participants connect from the place most of us are currently located - within the territorial boundaries of existing States.
If the answer is (1), I don't see why this has any relevance for the vast majority of VWs, practically or theoretically. If the answer is (2), then none of these scenarios address the concerns and issues I raised earlier, as both the participants and relevant infrastructure (to wit, whatever technology is being used to initiate and maintain the connection) are within the jurisdiction of States in the actual world.

Richard > The context of the remark was in response to Peter's suggestion that I want the protection of government for virtual worlds. [...] I don't want those benefits, so long as other people can't use some equivalent to them to get at me.

So how are you going to stop people from physically attacking/stealing your servers, initiating denial of service attacks, physically attacking your participants (eg: "offline PK"), etc.? Hate to point out that toading and FoDing ain't so effective in the meat world.

Richard > In practical terms, yes, I agree. The Great Debate was not, however, about whether virtual worlds WILL have sovereignty, but whether they SHOULD have it.

I will admit that I find it difficult to separate what we SHOULD do from the practical implications of doing so. Just to be clear then, your argument is that anyone who creates a VW SHOULD be granted absolute sovereignty? Thus, if I create a VW here in Canada (and only Canadians were participants, to keep things simple), the Canadian government SHOULD exempt me (and any of the participants in my VW?) from:

  • civil liability for any impact my negligence might have (eg: addiction, emotional distress, monetary loss, damage to infrastructure, etc.)
  • banking, taxation, anti-gambling, anti-trust statutes, etc.
  • privacy legislation (there is no privacy - all your data R belong to ME)
  • consumer protection legislation, employment laws, contract law, etc. I could thus perpetuate frauds on participants and abuse them at will - there would be no recourse (eg: I could charge them for a ten year subscription and shut the world down tomorrow - make and break any promises i like with impunity - the EULA/TOS would be meaningless)
  • intellectual property laws (eg: even if my "sovereign" VW is composed entirely of IP taken from your VW)
  • laws concerning the protection of minors, people with intellectual disabilities, etc. (eg: not my problem if minors are exposed to inappropriate content, etc.)
  • criminal statutes (child porn, sedition, conspiracies, money laundering, or anything else happening in the VW);
  • any other law that would be applicable, as well as the ability of the legislature to pass any future laws, etc.
Do you see any limits on the ability to declare the "sovereignty" you believe VWs should have? Are there any limits on the types of VWs that could declare such "sovereignty"? (eg: should the world meet some minimum standards, or should the Diku running on the box in my basement that only my 2 buddies log into be "sovereign"?) Do you see any limits (such as the ones above) on VW "sovereignty" being reasonable, from society's perspective? If not, perhaps you could elaborate on why such absolute sovereignty is an overall benefit to human society?

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