From a governance perspective – what the key structural differences between Virtual Worlds and the Internet and what does this mean for national governments?
As part of the work that the Virtual Policy Network think tank is doing I’m going to be part of the UK Government delegation the to Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad later this year where I'm supporting the organization of the workshop on virtual worlds (if you are a virtual world provider and interested in being a part of this please contact me via tVPN). It looks like I’ll be also be giving a short presentation on virtual worlds and particularly, as this is an ‘internet governance’ forum, the key differences between virtual worlds and ‘the internet’ as these pertain to governance.
I thought I’d run through an argument here for TNers to take apart before my eyes.
At the top level I want to take a fairly technologically deterministic approach to this. Then potentially problematize this in latter debate or other wise. Hence while I’m well aware that Actor Network Theory instructs us that technological artefacts are not simply what they are, nor are their uses or regulation a given – we do have a set of current artefact-practice networks that we can discuss on the terms that have emerged. Of course we can then argue that these are not necessary (in a philosophical sense).
So, what we have at had is the internet and virtual worlds. What, then, is what?
First we have the internet. As TN readers will know, the net is far from the formless cloud that most people imagine it is. The internet is just that an interconnected set of networks that are controlled by individual organizations the basic unit of management being the Autonomous System (AS). These are then connected using standard protocols that pass data from one to the other, the key things here being the Boarder Gateway Protocol (BGP) that controls these interconnections (and the advertisement of routs - that is who connects to who) and peering / transit arguments – which are the commercial agreements between any two network owners who interconnect (transit being paid for peering not – on the assumption that two peers pass traffic to each other in roughly equal measure). These networks are broadly ranked in terms of size, the Tier 1 networks being the small number of big global network, Tier 2 being regional networks and Tier 3 being your local ISP. Physically all this sits on a set of actual networks such as big under sea optical cables owned by yet another set of players who often host many or the ISPs. There are then interconnection points between networks, access points and ‘last mile’ connections i.e the wire or wireless to your door.
All of the above works because of a set of engineering and governance principles. There are high degrees of mutual dependency and commonality of protocol. Broad principles such as end-to-end (the idea the net is ‘neutral’ and that protocol specific stuff sits at the edge i.e. clients and servers) are applied – thought this is not universal and in some areas (especially the US) there are on-going debates over issues such as ‘net neutrality’.
This means that there is a technical, organizational and structural difference between who runs the network and who, runs a given application and who uses it. This in turn has give rise to governance principles and law. A key one being the notion of ‘common carrier’ that is if you are neutral in respect of the content you carry, you are not legally responsible for it e.g. the phone company is not responsible for what you say on the phone. Again, of course, such principles are more complex as carriers have legal duties to be reactive in terms of content control, and in some cases (an increasingly in some areas of the world) pro-active (c.f. ISP filtering, Viacom vs YouTube etc.).
Touching briefly on more sociological issues I would argue that the relationship between internet and community is a broad one. ISP’s are, and the internet can facilitate and even give rise to communities, but one would not, in any strong sense, want to point to internet users as an identifiable community. Indeed the use of the net is increasingly invisible to us. I press a button on my phone and a picture I just took ends up on Flickr – it used the net, but frankly I don’t care.
Then we have virtual worlds. From the context above, a virtual world is simply a n other application. On the whole, virtual worlds are very different from the internet (though here I will focus on what I term the metaverse model of virtual worlds, as opposed to the emerging highly distributed model that Vast Park, MetaPlace and the like are using).
Virtual words are client sever applications that use either largely proprietary protocols and clients (SL, WoW etc) or standard things like Flash / Java /clients (Habbo etc). Virtual worlds sit on top of the internet (or could be access via direct connection) and are highly centralized in terms of control of servers, client, assets, registration databases etc. Virtual worlds are not interconnected. Management of virtual worlds, in terms of technical control and customer support falls into three rough models global (EvE, There, SL etc); Regional (WoW, LOTRO), National (Habbo). Virtual worlds have identifiable and self-identifying communities.
Given the above, I would suggest that the key differences between the net and virtual worlds – when looking from a very high perspective of global governance structures, are:
- the net derives its nature and key benefits from being interconnected, global and ‘neutral’ (in terms of connection, content, protocol)
- virtual worlds derive their key benefits from creating ‘spaces’ with varying degrees of structure (often those structures being ones intended to generate game play) in which communities form
One might also want to differentiate between Virtual Worlds and some other internet based applications such as email. While one’s individual email servers is an island on the net that one connects to directly, email works because of the network effect of fact that individual servers can find and talk to each other.
Now, at this level of argument, if I were a national government I would not see any great reason why I should not regulate most virtual worlds on a national basis whereas I would see why I should be very careful about the application of nation law to the internet and would look to bodes such as the IETF, ICANN, IGF etc. After all, Habbo is national and there seems no strong argument why WoW etc should not also be, and why we could not either break up Second Life or strictly zone it around jurisdictional boundaries.
Personally, I think that one of the social goods that virtual worlds can bring about is the fact that they can create truly multi-national communities (on this point I have big issues with WoW etc making it hard for people to create global guild (I happen to be a member of AIE probably the most global guild in WoW)).
However, I think there need to be a number of strong arguments or more meat to the above argument, if the industry feels it should make a case against national regulation. Though I note there is a purely economic argument against it e.g. could something like ATITD even exist if it has to operate on a national basis? Of course on the other hand it might be the case that Virtual Worlds should operate like bricks and mortar companies – indeed we might say that the savings from greater clarity of regulation would be greater than the costs of national sharding (noting that data centres / customer service etc could still be centralized to a large degree).
So – what have I got wrong (my memory of the internet is rusty) and are what are the arguments around global / regional / national governance (on either side) that I’ve missed?
It is technically difficult to prevent foreigners connecting to your virtual world.
There are various things you can do, for example:
- Only accepting payment with credit cards that have a billing address in the right country
- Restricting the ranges of IP addresses that can connect
But there are ways to get around these blocks, and people will use them if there is sufficient incentive to do so.
Regulators need to be aware that if they pass regulations that make in-country servers unattractive relative to overseas ones, then players will connect to the overseas servers.
There's a similar problem if different countries have different rates of tax on alcohol or cigarettes, but the crucial difference with the Internet is that: (a) it is much, much easier to connect to a foreign web server than to take a day trip to Canada to go shopping; (b) there is no hope of preventing large-scale smuggling
PS. I just loved the way one of the first shops I passed after crossing the border from the US into Canada was a Cuban cigar store.
Posted by: SusanC | Aug 07, 2008 at 15:06
I'd also argue that Second Life derives a lot of its benfit from being interconnected: you can buy "content" (e.g. virtual clothes, furnitures, avatars, animations...) from lots of different providers and mix them together. Even more to the point, you can earn Linden dollars from one person and spend them to buy something from another. Money that you can only spend at one shop is considerably less attractive than money you can spend in lots of places.
SL is very different from (say) World of Warcraft, where the customer is expecting a unifed game experience from a single provider.
Posted by: SusanC | Aug 07, 2008 at 15:18
thanks a lot
Posted by: sohbet odaları | Aug 07, 2008 at 15:46
I think a pivotal question is, what does this National Government hope to gain through 'regulation'?
I'll proceed by guessing taxation and criminal law enforcement, two things that people are known to go to amazing lengths to avoid. I'm thinking, like SusanC says, it would be pretty easy for an SL content producer (or purchasing agent) of even modest means to get an address (IP or physical) in a country with no internet tax policy, for example. But then, isn't thems just the breaks? Californians find ways to make big purchases in Oregon all the time.
Governments looking to harvest cash from the internet should probably just collect a flat per-head from the company, as much as people who do zero RMT are going to hate that.
As for law enforcement, that's a really knotty problem. It probably calls for a revolution in the notion of jurisdiction before you even ask a code expert about protocol.
Posted by: Bret | Aug 07, 2008 at 16:49
> SusanC says:
> It is technically difficult to prevent foreigners connecting to your virtual world.
Sure but that does not mean that it is not attempted and that laws are not created based around the assumption that a Service Provider can make reasonable attempts - here I'm thinking of things like the position of Yahoo! and France. In both France and Germany there are laws about Nazi symbols hence Service Providers have to do something about their display and about the sale of artifacts to residents. No it's not perfect but laws against anything does not stop it happening.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 08, 2008 at 05:00
>SusanC says:
> I'd also argue that Second Life derives a lot of its benfit from being interconnected
Yes, SL gains very similar benefits form network effects. However, it would be a lot easier and a lot less painful to break up SL than it would the Net.
First, off there is, relative to the Net, almost no one using Second Life an ambient population of under 100k really does not count for much in global regulatory terms.
Second, SL could exist on a nation basis - look at OpenSim, these are very small groups of Sims, yes this is a spin off from SL but it shows that it's quite easy to split it out.
Third, why not change things to a mid way point. LL could act, as I've said in the past, as a high level DNS / identity / transaction authorizing authority but shards could be nationally based. There could also be an Auction House type system to sustain a global market - this would create a fine pinch point and make pro-active content regulation a feasible thing to do.
As noted above, I agree with the general thrust of your argument but I think it needs to be stronger some how. Maybe empirical data are required.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 08, 2008 at 05:08
I think the important bit in Susan's argument is that you can easily get through regional counter-measures, providing you're motivated to do some research. If there's a significant number of people, who want to get past this barrier, the ease of overcoming it will also increase. Think in terms of file-sharing and piracy. Back in 2000, along with the rise of DSL, P2P (BitTorrent, eDonkey, Kaaza) networks became very popular. A couple of years late the law caught up with technology and it was no longer safe to "share" files. Necessaty being the cause of invention, RapidShare was founded in Switzerland. To summarise, the prevention measures applied by governments are usually little more than a simple scare-crow policy. I know that you know, but it's a vital part one shouldn't forget.
In regards of inter-connectability: You've brought up a very interesting comparison of email-islands vs. VW-worlds. I would however like to point out a notable exception, being EVE Online. I'm no EVE guru, but as far as I understand EVE online, while being a world actually consists of a large number of small islands (solar systems), who in return consists of even smaller island (places you can warp to within the system). While EVE seems to be a good example to illustrate the point, the concept is all but unique. As long as you have borders (e.g loading screens within one continent) or geographical barriers (e.g. oceans requiring you to travel by ship) in the VW, you have the very same islands you're talking about in the internet. Consider it being an internet within the internet (another example, Usenet).
Posted by: Nicholas Chambers | Aug 08, 2008 at 07:22
>Nicholas Chambers
>As long as you have borders (e.g loading screens within one continent) or geographical barriers (e.g. oceans requiring you to travel by ship) in the VW, you have the very same islands you're talking about in the internet. Consider it being an internet within the internet (another example, Usenet)
It can be. But, even with EvE if it is structured as you say (which seems very like SL - which is a set of discrete servers) there is still a single name space and a single control system with very limited autonomy on top of that. SL is closer to the net in that there is greater autonomy, but there are still (logically) single asset servers.
So again, it's all ripe for regulation for the State that feels a need.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 08, 2008 at 12:45
>Bret says:
>I think a pivotal question is, what does this National Government hope to gain through 'regulation'?
Well I'm addressing the IGF which is a UN Forum - so the question is 'what do Governments want to gain?'.
To that there is no single answer even for a given government.
I think that the issues that governments are interested in really fall into the same ones that impact the internet:
- child safty
- fraud
- IP rights
- money laundering
- terrorism
Of course there are a whole other set of questions such as:
- has any of this got anything to do with VW's
- will regulation help in any meaningful ways
But these are different arguments. All I'm saying here is:
- structurally what are the differences and how to they impact on the possibility of regulation
and
- what are the positive arguments against such regulation
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 08, 2008 at 12:57
There is no legitimate reason to take the overwhelmingly oppressive step of prohibiting people of different nationalities interacting with each other through any communications medium, whether it be virtual worlds or anything else. None of the goals listed above (child protection, fraud, IP rights, etc.) are specifically national or would be enhanced in any way by the forced parochial segregation suggested; nor are any of them issues specific to virtual worlds, nor issues that require regulation specific to virtual worlds. Committing fraud, infringing copyrights and trademarks, laundering the proceeds of crime, endangering children and committing acts of terrorism are all already unlawful, and there is nothing about virtual worlds that makes the enforcement of such laws so difficult that any further restriction on individual liberties of users who have not done anything wrong is warranted for such enforcement.
I notice in particular that some of the issues in the list (terrorism and money laundering) are wholly fanciful concerns: there is nothing about virtual worlds as they presently exist that make laundering any quantity of money that is likely to be worth laundering, or planning any acts of terrorism, any easier than it would be without such virtual worlds.
There is nothing about the fact that virtual worlds are structured around virtual spaces that provides any justification for forcibly prohibiting people from different nationalities interacting in those virtual spaces: the whole point of virtual worlds is their very virtuality - the simulation of certain aspects of reality, but with many of the barriers to doing things that people want to do that exist in physical spaces removed, one of which barriers is the difficulty in travelling regularly to distant places and interacting with people from such places.
Virtual worlds thrive because of the numbers and variety of people sharing the same environment: if virtual worlds were forcibly restricted to those only of certain nationalities, their economy would be crippled: people would only be able to invite others from their own nation to events, only able to have others from their own nation purchasing their goods or using their services or displaying or viewing their art or advertisements; in short, it would be a disaster that would fatally cripple the very essence of these worlds' economies.
For any given restriction in liberty by the state, there needs to be a compelling reason. The more that people desire to exercise the liberty, and the more benefit that accrues from exercising it, the more compelling that any reason to restrict it must be before any such restriction is justified. No reason whatsoever, let alone a compelling one, has been put forward for any parochial restrictions of the sort mentioned. Even China does not stop foreigners connecting to its virtual worlds, as far as I am aware, and there are people from China in SecondLife. It would take an almost unimaginably compelling reason to force restrictions of liberty of the sort mentioned, so extreme in nature as to be more oppressive even than those of most dictatorships. There is no such reason.
National segregation along the lines suggested would be, in effect, a grotesque sort of virtual apartheid and must be opposed at any cost.
Posted by: Ashcroft Burnham | Aug 09, 2008 at 06:52
> Ashcroft Burnham
Great comments, except:
> Virtual worlds thrive because of the numbers and variety of people sharing the same environment: if virtual worlds were forcibly restricted to those only of certain nationalities, their economy would be crippled
Not true.
Habbo has 100 million+ registrations and it's based on National 'hotels'
WoW has 10 million+ registrations and is split regionally
Thus evidence would seem to suggest that geographical restrictions are actually beneficial, would it not?
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 09, 2008 at 07:12
In most software development, you have a rather large up-front cost to develop the software, and then a very low marginal cost for each additional copy that you sell. To be economically viable - and recover the initial investment - you need as many customers as possible. So for a software company, government regulation that prevents them selling to overseas customers is very bad news indeed.
Virtual worlds have a higher marginal cost than - for example - a word processing package, because the require on-line servers that get more loaded as more people connect. To saying nothing of the support costs of dealing with griefing incidents.
But still, a VW operator needs a large customer base to recover their investment.
Now, you can shard the world on a national basis, so that the software developer gets to sell the same product[*] all over the world, but the customers in different countries can't communicate with each other.
[*] There are added costs of localized software and ensuring complaince with different local laws, of course.
But what about user-generated content? (As in, for example, Second Life). UGC is basically software (sounds, graphics images, programs...) and it has the same economic problem that you need a large customer base to recover your investment. So the providers of UGC will want to sell globally, too. But if the government allows this, then the shards are no longer "national" any more.
Posted by: SusanC | Aug 09, 2008 at 07:45
Ren,
one cannot lump together every kind of virtual world and treat it as one, and assume that what works for one virtual environment that is designed from the ground up to work in that way will work for every virtual environment when it is forced on it from outside.
Habbo is a 3d chat facility specifically for teenagers. It is basic in functionality: there is no content creation by users, for example: the environment is entirely created by the provider.
World of Warcraft is a game. As with most games, low latency times for players are especially important for interactions that require fast reactions. A great many multiplayer games (such as the first-person shooter games) share the same characteristic. For that reason, it is an advantage for players to play on servers geographically close to them. There is thus, in games in which fast reaction times are required, a technical advantage to a regional structure (and note, geographical: not jurisdictional).
World of Warcraft does not need any particular networking effects to work well: all that it needs is a sufficient number of players overall per environment to make the game play well. When one is slaying monsters, it does not much matter whether one's fellow monster-slayers are located next door or on the other side of the world, nor is there any particular advantage to universality of environment.
Generic social virtual worlds such as SecondLife are different: they are underpinned by an economy that relies on user generated content creation. In other words, unlike Habbo and World of Warcraft, which use a one-to-many model, SecondLife and such environments use a many-to-many model. The efficiency of such an economy depends on the total possible number of connexions between people in a way that a one-to-many economy does not. Any segregation therefore imperils the very underlying purpose of a virtual world of the type mentioned.
In any event, I am extremely concerned at the nature of the reasoning employed: I reiterate that a compelling reason is required to restrict liberty. The presumption must be that people are free to do whatever they like unless there is such a compelling reason to restrict liberty, wherein such a restriction should be imposed only to the extent justified by the compelling reason, and no further.
It is inconceivable that the sort of reasoning that you suggest above - that not exercising the liberty of international connexion works for some platforms - could ever be capable of being a reason to deny that liberty to anyone by force. If geographical limitation was beneficial, then one would expect market forces to bring about geographical limitation in most cases. That would certainly not be a reason to force such limitation on everyone, whether they wanted it or not.
I am also very concerned by what you wrote in a previous post, that those who question the merits of imposing such an extreme and oppressive forcible restriction of liberty as you suppose ought produce empirical evidence to support the benefits of the liberties which they wish to exercise. It is not for those who are presently at liberty to do something that they want to do to produce evidence to their would-be oppressors that their liberties are valuable enough to be worth preserving: it is for those who seek to restrict liberties to produce compelling (and, in the case of such an extreme restriction as is here proposed, overwhelming) evidence that the overall effects of such a restriction will be vastly more beneficial than detrimental. I repeat: the presumption in any free society must be liberty. As I explained at length in my post above, there is not one iota of reasoning, let alone any compelling reason, to impose the sort of virtual apartheid suggested.
Posted by: Ashcroft Burnham | Aug 09, 2008 at 08:12
SusanC,
SL certainly seems to be an exception. As such it's probably not a good idea to look at general policy principles based upon it. As noted above there is at least one way round the issue of the reduced market size of the type of UGC that you mention above - that's having a online world market. It looks like this would just be the same, but I think it would be a lot easier to regulate a market system like that than SL in general.
There is also the notion of zoning SL into national areas where different rules apply.
However I there is a wider point in what you said, that's that UGCis not not SL type objects - the whole practice of using VW's is based on UGC in the form of the presence, actions, type and social structures created by other players. Elements of this are lost if one restricts nationally.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 09, 2008 at 08:19
Ren,
the fact that there are differences (you call them "exceptions", but there is no basis for quantifying any one model as the "norm": there are simply variations) is precisely why regulation based on any one specific model is inherently misconceived, and why it is necessary for people to have liberty to develop or employ any model that they like (whether or not it is presently common, or even presently invented) without one iota more restriction in liberty than known on the basis of compelling evidence to be absolutely necessary.
Posted by: Ashcroft Burnham | Aug 09, 2008 at 08:25
First, I think I need to be more clear that the arguments that I’m putting forward are mainly those that I feel will come from sections of the audience at the IGF meeting later this year. Here there will be representatives of many countries that are pro-regulation to the point of overt censorship.
I’m aware that taking what one might call Western Libertarianism as an axiomatic truth is not a strong way to argue when one is on the global regulatory stage.
>> Ashcroft Burnham
>> one cannot lump together every kind of virtual world and treat it as one, and assume that what works for one virtual environment that is designed from the ground up to work in that way will work for every virtual environment when it is forced on it from outside.
I agree. That’s why I used specific examples to show that what I took to be your general assertion “Virtual worlds thrive because of…” was not true in at least some cases.
In generally I’d probably be even less categorical about things. You say below that WoW is a game, it is, but that’s not all it is, and the multi-faceted and disputed conceptual nature of VW’s is something we always have to keep in our minds.
>> Habbo is a 3d chat facility specifically for teenagers. It is basic in functionality: there is no content creation by users, for example: the environment is entirely created by the provider.
Well there are also games and a micro-payment system for objects in-world, but in general you are right.
>>World of Warcraft is a game. As with most games, low latency times for players are especially important for interactions that require fast reactions. A great many multiplayer games (such as the first-person shooter games) share the same characteristic. For that reason, it is an advantage for players to play on servers geographically close to them. There is thus, in games in which fast reaction times are required, a technical advantage to a regional structure (and note, geographical: not jurisdictional).
Again, in general, yes. Though I play WoW on US servers and almost never have a problem with lag.
>>World of Warcraft does not need any particular networking effects to work well: all that it needs is a sufficient number of players overall per environment to make the game play well. When one is slaying monsters, it does not much matter whether one's fellow monster-slayers are located next door or on the other side of the world, nor is there any particular advantage to universality of environment.
This depends where one is locating primacy. From the game mechanic point of view this is true. But for me it’s almost over riding that the person standing next to me is from somewhere else. My main guild is possibly the most international WoW guild and we have a follow the sun effect as players come on line as different parts of the world wake up, it’s great.
>Generic social virtual worlds such as SecondLife are different:
You say ‘such as’ – what other examples would you cite or are we actually just talking about SL here?
>> they are underpinned by an economy that relies on user generated content creation. In other words, unlike Habbo and World of Warcraft, which use a one-to-many model, SecondLife and such environments use a many-to-many model. The efficiency of such an economy depends on the total possible number of connexions between people in a way that a one-to-many economy does not. Any segregation therefore imperils the very underlying purpose of a virtual world of the type mentioned.
I’ve commented above on two counts (1) SL is an exception, let’s not base policy on it unless there is good reason. (2) there are ways to get round this issue and still make SL easier to regulate.
>In any event, I am extremely concerned at the nature of the reasoning employed: I reiterate that a compelling reason is required to restrict liberty. The presumption must be that people are free to do whatever they like unless there is such a compelling reason to restrict liberty, wherein such a restriction should be imposed only to the extent justified by the compelling reason, and no further.
No. I just don’t think that telling this to many nations is just not going to get anywhere. What’s more even nations that put notions of freedom pretty high, also take the line that some restriction creates freedom (which of course is one of the basics of many strands of political philosophy). Kids is oven the way into this. Different countries have very different views of what kids should be exposed and what reasonable limits on freedom are to preserve this.
>It is inconceivable that the sort of reasoning that you suggest above - that not exercising the liberty of international connexion works for some platforms - could ever be capable of being a reason to deny that liberty to anyone by force.
Maybe, just maybe not in places like the UK – but Australia (where they are filtering the entire internet), Thailand (where there are specific restriction about what you can say about the Monarchy), Germany (where you cannot display Nazi symbols). What reasons are there that places like this should not extend the philosophy of regulation that they have into virtual worlds and what better way for them to do it than imposing, by statue, geographic seperation?
>If geographical limitation was beneficial, then one would expect market forces to bring about geographical limitation in most cases.
Of course that’s what we do see in many cases. Regionalization of operation has a number of advantages and all the big MMOs that we are seeing these days are doing it – LOTRO, Conan etc.
>That would certainly not be a reason to force such limitation on everyone, whether they wanted it or not.
It’s not, but for some governments the things I’ve noted above are.
Now one might say – ok, one will never change their mind, so that case is lost. So maybe those that sit on the edge such as France and Germany that have higher regulatory tendencies but also recognize ‘western’ notions of information freedom etc are the ones that should be hearing these arguments. But again I think we need to rest on more than principles of freedom, we have to take things further and demonstrate things – evidence based policy is all the range, certainly in the UK.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 09, 2008 at 08:53
>I am also very concerned by what you wrote in a previous post, that those who question the merits of imposing such an extreme and oppressive forcible restriction of liberty as you suppose ought produce empirical evidence to support the benefits of the liberties which they wish to exercise. It is not for those who are presently at liberty to do something that they want to do to produce evidence to their would-be oppressors that their liberties are valuable enough to be worth preserving: it is for those who seek to restrict liberties to produce compelling (and, in the case of such an extreme restriction as is here proposed, overwhelming) evidence that the overall effects of such a restriction will be vastly more beneficial than detrimental. I repeat: the presumption in any free society must be liberty. As I explained at length in my post above, there is not one iota of reasoning, let alone any compelling reason, to impose the sort of virtual apartheid suggested.
Oops, sorry, missed this bit off.
I think it is. At the moment I’m restricted from being on Global WoW servers, they don’t exist, so if we think that it’s a good thing to have open access to servers then we need to persuade Blizzard to change their model.
If another country forces Blizzard to make a national versions of WoW then I’m restricted form playing with people from that country. Again another argument to have.
There are countries that I suggest, as they become more aware of VW’s, will want to regulate them more – hence one does have to pro-actively argue that it should not happen.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 09, 2008 at 09:01
Ren,
there is nothing inherently "Western" about the principle that liberty should only forcibly be restricted for a compelling reason. That a principle is more popularly held in some places than others cannot of itself mean that the principle is only relevant or applicable in the places in which it is popular. There is only one truth, and, whatever it is, it necessarily applies everywhere.
The right approach to those from oppressive regimes who might seek to force a virtual apartheid on their citizens is to question and undermine their reasoning for doing so (as I have done above), and make the point that one cannot sensibly predict what good things that people will want to do with the liberties that of which they seek to deprive their populaces, and give examples of how ill-conceived regulation could have a disastrous effect on highly valuable activities, the implication being that there are an untold number more such effects just waiting to be found, and which are likely to be found only when it is too late.
As I noted above, it is fundamentally wrong to base regulation ("policy", as you put it) on the uses that happen to be most common now without regard for the fact that technology is changing so fast that what is common now is not a useful predictor of what will be popular and useful in the future. It is wholly misconceived to create a generic category of virtual worlds, lump them all together for the purposes of regulation, and then say of some that they are "exceptions" which should be ignored for the purposes of regulation. simply on the grounds that their user base is lower in numerical terms than some others.
Why create one "virtual worlds" category at all? Either one should go up in the chain of abstraction, and lump all "internet" uses together (the web, virtual worlds, e-mail, online games, VPN, etc.), and have a generalised regulatory approach for all, or one should split it more precisely, and have one approach for games, one for social virtual worlds, etc.. I favour the former approach, since anything that forces predetermined categories of use on an inherently flexible technology stifles innovation and oppresses the freedom of choice necessary for a healthy economy. (Incidentally, as to other platforms "like" SecondLife, there are the SecondLife based OpenSim worlds, which are likely to increase greatly in popularity over the years, there are things such as OpenCroquet; Google Lively might end up having some resemblance to SecondLife, and there may be a myriad virtual worlds as yet uninvented - regulation must take into account the future as well as the present.)
As I have stated above, there are simply no compelling reasons to treat virtual worlds any differently to the rest of the internet in terms of regulation. If there is no reason to treat them differently, it is wrong to treat them differently, since it is always wrong to act irrationally.
It is usually easier to undermine another's positive claim than to make one's own, which is why it is important that the approach should be relentlessly to question and find the inherent contradictions and false premises that are inevitable in those who seek to oppress liberty, rather simply than relying on the argument that there are specific goods which can be achieved by non-regulation that therefore ought to be preserved, not least because the latter approach is vulnerable to weak counter-arguments and tacitly accepts that it is only those specific identified goods that exist at present that justify the retention of liberties, which is manifestly false.
The approach should be that, if oppressive regimes wish to enforce a virtual apartheid, then non-oppressive regimes will have a powerful economic advantage in the sector, and there may be a high level of dissent from a population unhappy at having their liberty to join in a thriving world network oppressed for insufficient justification.
Finally, can you explain what you mean by this comment:
"there are ways to get round this issue and still make SL easier to regulate"?
Virtual worlds should not be "easy to regulate" if by "regulate" you mean imposing additional restrictions on liberty, rather than enforcing those that already exist.
Posted by: Ashcroft Burnham | Aug 09, 2008 at 09:24
Ren,
as to your last comment, I think that you fundamentally misconceive liberty (unless you are playing devil's advocate).
There is a fundamental difference between you not being able to play on global World of Warcraft servers because the people who own the servers have decided not to make them global than you not being able to play on global World of Warcraft servers because some national government has oppressed the liberty of Blizzard to create such servers. The former comes about as a consequence of liberty, not the oppression of it: Blizzard are free to create a virtual world in whatever way that they see fit, whether on a global or national scale. Others are free to create competing virtual worlds that work in a different way, and you are free to choose between them. The latter is a consequence of a repression of free choice, and would create circumstnaces in which nobody would be able to create any global virtual worlds, whatever advantages that they might have, and you would have no choice to use any globalised virtual worlds.
Posted by: Ashcroft Burnham | Aug 09, 2008 at 09:31
Some concluding remarks: firstly, the best approach for the UK government, or any other government of a free society, to take at such a conference is that we will certainly not stand for national segregation for all the reasons that I have given above, and that if a few oppressive regimes wish to engage in it, then they will be outside the mainstream of international virtual worlds, and will suffer economically for it.
Secondly, on the point of treating SecondLife as an exception: it is only by what is ultimately an arbitrary choice of abstraction that one can treat it as an exception. At one level, one can take as a group the whole internet, and say that virtual worlds in general are an exception, so one should not make policy with virtual worlds in mind. On the other hand, one might equally say that the correct abstraction is specific types of games or virtual worlds: SecondLife is certainly not "an exception" in the class generic, social virtual worlds in which user-generated content is a key part of the user experience. This is, more or less, the same point as made above, but expressed more clearly, I hope.
Thirdly, one of the major emergent uses for virtual worlds is in business: people have business conferences accross multiple continents, are able to meet clients in a simulated face-to-face environment even when the clients are many miles away (see the Association of Virtual Worlds' website for more information. This is a potentially very important use for virtual worlds, and one which is only just emerging: it would be insane to prevent by force for what are ultimately trivial or non-existent reasons people from undertaking such highly beneficial economic activity which might not only make businesses more economically efficient, but might have a positive environmental impact if the need to travel is considerably reduced.
Posted by: Ashcroft Burnham | Aug 09, 2008 at 13:26
This is a very good point. The rising price of oil makes air travel more expensive, which in turn means there is a stronger incentive to converse with business partners over the net, rather than fly transatlantic to meet them. This kind of use makes more sense across national borders than it does national (if your collegue works down the hallway, you can just go meet them in person).
A more general point is that there are different kinds of virtual worlds, which pose different regulatory challenges. Holding a business meeting in Second Life is very different from playing World of Warcraft.
Although Second Life-type virtual worlds have fewer users than WoW, they pose more serious challenges to regulators, and I don't think we should just pretend they don't exist or hope they will go away.
Posted by: SusanC | Aug 09, 2008 at 14:18
That's a very good point. VW's that don't provide support for user-created bitmaps or programs still contain a huge amount of "user-generated content" in terms of what people say to each other etc. We've touched on this before in discussions of how much a VW is a creation of the company who runs it vs a creation of the players.
In economic terms though, user-to-user dialogue is different: it isn't amenable to mass production in the same way that a bitmap or a program can be cheaply duplicated. So there isn't the same need for a really large user base to make things viable: it works just as well in a "small" VW.
This raises an interesting question: is there a "critical mass" of users for different kinds of social structures, and if so, what it it? In other words, how big does a VW need to be if it wants to encourage a particular type of social activity? (e.g. markets probably require more than a few participants to function).
Posted by: SusanC | Aug 09, 2008 at 14:31
I think we also need to look at the question of why governments might be interested in regulating virtual worlds at all. I mean, we tell users all the time "don't freak out, it's just a game" - is that something we can tell governments too?
I don't think so, partly because users consider some aspects of virtual worlds to be as real as anything in the "real" world. The most obvious example is property and money.
Money is such a wifty concept in the real world, virtual money seems no different.
Many people don't even use coins or bills anymore in their everyday lives. I just swipe my card at the store and see the numbers are lower when I check my bank balance on my computer when I get home. The same computer where I'm buying a new set of armor for my avatar, I just ordered a new jacket for myself. It arrives next week.
To me, this is why virtual worlds feel inherently different from the rest of the internet. They even highlight the "virtual" parts of the real world that we all accept as real, but only because we all agree and in most cases officially legislate or regulate these things.
So if there are regulations about how money works in the real world, it seems logical that there should be regulations about how money works in the virtual world.
And yet... it's all just a game.
Sorry, I'm not sure I've helped anything here. I just wanted to point out what I see as the fundamental difference between virtual worlds and any other software functioning on/with the internet. It's the way virtual worlds feel and the way they mimic real life and even intersect with it. Humans are messy, especially when our feelings get involved.
Posted by: subversified | Aug 09, 2008 at 23:29
Hoping I'm not stepping way out of my depth by participating in this debate...
While I generally agree with Mr. Reynolds PoV, I understand the 'nobility' of Mr. Abernathy's as well. It seems like the eternal debate of the "Idealist" vs the "Realist." There ARE governments that are going to continue to regulate (or attempt to regulate) content. Maintaining an active dialogue with those governments seems to override imposing an "inalienable Human Liberty" philosophy all at once.
It is with regret that I would concede any Liberties, in the name of future freedoms--too often those 'wooden tokens' are never redeemed. But I remain optimistic that the 'half-open door' can be opened further rather than closed completely if we remain vigilant.
Finally, while I agree that there ARE universal Rights, rights and wrongs we have to be careful about what basis and whose perspective we use to determine those universalities. There are probably people in some oppressive regimes that genuinely believe that they are protecting the children/"the people" by limiting access. As well, Western ideals of freedom have changed over time...are we to base the definition of "complete Liberty" on 19th century thought? 20th? 21st? 22d?
Asking governments to subsribe to an ever-evolving concept of "Liberty" would serve further alienate, rather than bring to the table those governments we seek to change.
Other terms in the thread that beg definition (and by lack of definition show the gray areas):
Terrorist, Child protection (from what?), Individual Intellectual and Property rights.
In terms of a governments goals, I believe that each government considers it it's responsiblity to make it's governed "better." Obviously, that term will mean different things to different people...does better mean more free? More creative? More comptetitive? Observation of the Romanian Womens Gymnastic team would lead one to believe that they were more 'competitive' when governed by a more oppresive regime, but they seem more 'free' under the current regime.
Again, I appreciate the opportunity to post my opinions.
And it is "just a game." Until someone loses an eye. (or an "I").
Posted by: SteveC | Aug 12, 2008 at 10:31
I am interested in the issue of defining Virtual Worlds (which matters for deciding what is going to be regulated).
There was a thread above about social virtual worlds and SL (is it an exception?). For example, is content creation a bright dividing line? I think it is a good candidate (although, the experience of playing with other players and the sociability of guilds does not easily fall into a one-to-many or top-down categorization).
Is "social"? that is trickier. MMOGs are of course social, but there does seem to be a difference between mission-driven games and "places to hang out" like There.com or SL.
The arrival of Lively (and maybe habbo. I don't know it as well) may muddy the effort to categorize social virtual worlds.
What are other possible candidates (including defunct ones) to look at as social VWs? My partial list includes
The Sims Online
Active Worlds
There.com
Second Life
Stagecoach island (Wells Fargo)
Open Sim
Are there others?
Posted by: Jordi | Aug 15, 2008 at 11:41
[Sorry for delays in response, I’ve been in Edinburgh for a week organizing the Digital Interactive Symposium]
>Jordi says:
>I am interested in the issue of defining Virtual Worlds
I’m building on stuff I’ve written here before:
4 Worlds Theory
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/08/the_four_worlds.html
Taxonomy
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/03/vw-taxonomy-q1.html
I think that the SL is on the other side of a bright line because of it’s combination of user-generation, IP rights and assumed meanings and norms of the space.
>Sims Online
this formally shut in 1 Aug 2008 I think
>Stagecoach island (Wells Fargo)
If you mean in Second Life – this closed down years ago and the moved to a different platform.
>Open Sim
>Are there others?
Many, many, many…
The list on the left of TN is just a very small sample of the VW”s out there.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 16, 2008 at 10:43
> Ashcroft Burnham
>The right approach to those from oppressive regimes who might seek to force a virtual apartheid on their citizens is to question and undermine their reasoning for doing so (as I have done above)
As noted, I don’t think you do. I think you state a different axiom and go from there.
>Why create one "virtual worlds" category at all?
Isn’t that how regulation works? In the UK we have the BBFC – it regulates ‘video works’ which now include computer games who’s content is fixed in a medium. Your argument would seem to suggest that we say that Horror Movies should be regulated differently from Comedies – but that seems un-manageable.
What’s more, as I outlined in the original post, there in-fact are things which Virtual Worlds share in common, hence one can, at certainly levels of abstraction, create a regulatable set. Indeed, this is how I believe people thing, so, if we think that while this might make sense in some abstract and arbitrary way we need to show this. And I really don’t think that one can assume that regulators or others will just see sense, I think that there are specific positions like this that make sense in under their conceptual framework than thus need to be specifically argued against if one believe that they are misconceived.
> As I have stated above, there are simply no compelling reasons to treat virtual worlds any differently to the rest of the internet in terms of regulation.
We are now simply repeating arguments, but in summary, from a regulator point of view I suggest the compelling argument is: we /can/ regulate virtual worlds in a national basis and loose little of their apparent goods, this is not the same as Internet as network effects are lower for the vast majority of virtual worlds.
> The approach should be that, if oppressive regimes wish to enforce a virtual apartheid, then non-oppressive regimes will have a powerful economic advantage in the sector
That I think is a very good counter argument.
>"there are ways to get round this issue and still make SL easier to regulate"?
>Virtual worlds should not be "easy to regulate" if by "regulate" you mean imposing additional restrictions on liberty, rather than enforcing those that already exist.
That depends who you are – in this thread I am trying to take the position of a highly pro-regulation body as I know that that’s who I’ll be arguing with at some of the intergovernmental forums that I’m attending over the next few months.
>There is a fundamental difference between you not being able to play on global World of Warcraft servers because the people who own the servers have decided not to make them global than you not being able to play on global World of Warcraft servers because some national government has oppressed the liberty of Blizzard to create such servers. The former comes about as a consequence of liberty, not the oppression of it
To me, as a player, and in terms of specific short term outcomes – there is no difference.
>and you are free to choose between them.
I’m not free to choose a global WoW server as it does not exist.
>The latter is a consequence of a repression of free choice, and would create circumstnaces in which nobody would be able to create any global virtual worlds, whatever advantages that they might have, and you would have no choice to use any globalised virtual worlds.
I do get your point. However I don’t agree with a strict separation between restrictions created by regulation and those created by free market actors – as the relation between governments and markets is highly complex, and as we see in some regulated environments in some instances governmental regulation has the impact of greater choice in the market because the free market would not serve some needs. Hence we always need to be mindful of how things will play out in different markets – the problem on a global level is that a single stance on regulation can have widely different market outcomes in different parts of the world.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Aug 16, 2008 at 10:45
I understand why libertarians make this distinction, but I'm not sure I entirely believe it.
Now I think about it, the video game industry might be a good example of how this kind of position can come unstuck. Games consoles are made by only a handful of manufacturers (high cost of entry to the market), who use technical means to exercize control over what kind of game is produced for their platforms. Children (or rather parents buying for their children) are a major part of the market, so the console manufacturers have a financial incentive to prevent the production of games that parents want to prevent their children accessing (e.g. porn games). This happens even though there are adult consumers who would buy these games and programmers who would produce them. (See Second Life for what happens when this control on the market is removed).
In the end, a private company with monopoly control over some piece of critical infrastructure can impose restrictions in much the same way as a government using its monopoly of violence.
For a hypothetical, science ficiton example of the same point: imagine if a company who is not the government controls all food production (because they own all the property that is needed for food production, such as agricultural land). If they dont like you, you starve to death.
Posted by: SusanC | Aug 16, 2008 at 14:06