Um, you may sarcastically sneer at land barons, but you’re forgetting that when you sneer at them, you sneer at their customers, who have cheaper, more zoned and regulated and better-managed rentals than they can get by buying directly from Governor Linden.

Everybody loves the idea of sticking it to Mr. Money-Bags in their facile anti-capitalist memes on the Internet with their warmed-over treacly Marxist ideologies. But…when you start seeing that in fact you’ve harmed “the People” who are the overwhelming majority of residents who RENT and not BUY, you may re-think it. What happens to all those people?

Do they now go to host-your-own, who are merely the new barons, or the same barons now hosting their own but with HIGHER prices because THEIR COSTS WILL BE HIGHER DUH? or did you think getting a couple servers and a T1 line or whatever to run the thing, plus maybe programming help or having to rent space in colos — do you think that will be as cheap as $295 a month per sim as we now pay to Lindens? Hello? That’s when all these smug tekkies who’ve been yammering for ages about cheaper servers and ranting that the Lindens overcharge will now have to shut up, because the actual costs for doing this, when it involves streaming worlds and taking care of people, not just pages, on them, will suddenly loom large.

As for Chadrick and his masters in the Second Life Experience, I have no doubt that when they reinforce their control, ideology, and culture on the remainders of us who are on the mainland after they spin off islands, it will be even more unbearable than it is now.

Interstingly, Chadwick Linden had some comments on the Estate Governance entry on the Linden blog. He started calling the Grid the collection of private islands, with the mainland still being run and AR system to Linden as the “Second Life Experience”, so clearly he let slip about something in the future, and he seems to feel there are already two separate entities.

But in the same way the client has been Open Sourced, it’s no secret they want to see the server side Open Sourced too, with the possibility of linking other servers to the grid. Good for Linden as they’ll still be able to charge tier in the form of connection fees, not so good for the Land Barons, who might start dealing with cheaper comptition, or even the prospect of us all having our own private sim… My heart so bleeds for them all

So, in a nutshell, what I was trying to say is that I believe for the web to become a 3D multi-metaverse, there will be an open-standard 3D protocol (3D-HTML or whatever), there will be an availability of open/free servers and clients (akin to Apache and Firefox) as well as commercial ones (akin to IIS and Internet Explorer). And that I believe that client side assets will be the norm (with and without DRM style client side copy protection, the same way that today we have DRM and DRM free music and copy protected and free software).

I do not doubt that there will be metaverses in the multi-metaverse (Web) which will require centralized assets and the big players will try to get it that way, because they will try to lock you into their systems.

But only time will tell … I don’t want to lecture or convince you or anybody of anything, just sharing my ideas.

It’s like the statement that Jack Linden once made to me, which I have emblazoned on my profile, “There will always be a mainland.”

Well, yes and no. The Lindens can and do change the mainland in very substantial ways:

o removal of telehubs
o decision not to put roads on the southern continent
o decision to start selling some land that was previously “not for sale”
o decision to stop building things that help orient/zone/make look better some continents

The TOS doesn’t say there will ‘always be a mainland’. Nothing says that. Instead, it says “expect constant change”. For any reason, or no reason, they could close it tomorrow as not working.

Obviously, it can’t scale, among other problems with it. At any time, Chadrick or any of the others may declare the mainland to be “Linden Village and orientation islands and some landowners we like” and there will be nothing that anyone else can do.

http://tinyurl.com/283skf (Official Blog, comment #22)

In response to an unrelated question, Chadrick Linden writes: “The grid, comprised of Private Islands. The Mainland will always be considered Second Life and run by the Lab.”

I’m not at all thinking “it’s extreme” that there will be some 3-D Internet with billions of users just like the 2-D Internet with billions of users. Many people like to think of that Internet as “free,” or “open course” because it incorporates those two features of it widely. But most of us don’t spend any significant time on the “free open source” part of it, being on either news sites, our company’s sites, shopping sites that are closed, proprietary, and *paid for*.

Please, don’t lecture me about this widget or that gadget or this thingie or that thingie that make up the Intarwebs. I know all about that. And same for worlds. But it’s also stuff people PAY FOR.

There’s a lot of electricity usage, band width, and staffing required for the 3-D Internet. It requires businesses paying for those resources, which are not given free out of Howard Rheingold’s ass. Try to use common sense and logic here, Nicholasz. Whatever freebieness and opensourcery are involved, I can’t figure it will be any different than existing Hollywood and big media now — because it needs PAYING FOR and those things that are willing to PAY will have to CHARGE to make mass entertainment.

Your willingness to write off huge chunks of the Metaverse like big companies or WoW lets me know that you are like those people in the Well or other various geeky outposts in Web 1.0, not getting that it could only grow if it commercialized significantly.

People want worlds, and user content needs protection — from other users. And those companies that supply those things will win.

The Metaverse is not going to be Creative Commons with hippies in Birkenstocks eating granola and earnestly having seminars about clean energy. It’s going to be like a strip in Vegas. Hell, it’s already like a strip in Vegas.

I was speaking of the 3D internet with billions of users, the way 2D internet is now. You may think this is extreme, but if internet will go 3D in a way similar to how SL now and a similar proportion HTML is now, there is no way of keeping the asset side server side for all. There may be partial closed systems (like apple with ipod and their itunes store now) and there may be copy protection of one way or another that (as with software nowaday) creates a basic layer of protection, but I see no reason why billions of users should have their assets handled centrally when first, this is a huge bottleneck and second when it does not offer any better asset protection (as CopyBot or GLI shows) and third when you pay for this with tons of other problems (performance, legal liability, personal rights, personal data) … I am not speaking of items as in SL where they just say “sorry” if they happen to wipe out your inventory or you can’t access your stuff, because you do not own it anyway.

But time will tell … prognosis is especially hard, when it’s about the future.

More from the Lindens and Khamon Fate and Jarod Godel, who bring you the Distributed Hosted Gr1D!

>My point is, that central asset servers will fail to provide protection the same way that DRM failed to protect digital media and seems to hurt sales more than it helps.

Nicholas, I don’t know what setting you are in that you believe this extremism, but it’s just belied by most normal practice in RL. DRM indeed protecst a lot of digital media, and indeed, central assets servers or closed systems like WoW have millions of people in them, and that’s how many people would prefer their Metaverse. Don’t confuse your own tiny class of tekkies or lefties or whatever and what you wish to be “reality”.