net.wars

This has been the week for reminders that the border between real life and cyberspace is a permeable blood-brain barrier.

On Wednesday, Linden Labs announced that it was banning gambling in Second Life. The resentment expressed by some of SL residents is understandable but naive. We're not at the beginning of the online world any more; Second Life is going through the same reformation to take account of national laws as Usenet and the Web did before it.

Second, this week MySpace deleted the profiles of 29,000 American users identified as sex offenders. That sounds like a lot, but it's a tiny percentage of MySpace's 180 million profiles. None of them, be it noted, are Canadian.

There's no question that gambling in Second Life spills over into the real world. Linden dollars, the currency used in-world, have active exchange rates, like any other currency, currently running about L$270 to the US dollar. (When I was writing about a virtual technology show, one of my interviewees was horrified that my avatar didn't have any distinctive clothing; she was and is dressed in the free outfit you are issued when you join. He insisted on giving me L$1,000 to take her shopping. I solemnly reported the incident to my commissioning editor, who felt this wasn't sufficiently corrupt to worry about: US$3.75! In-world, however, that could buy her several cars.) Therefore: the fact that the wagering takes place online in a simulated casino with pretty animated decorations changes nothing. There is no meaningful difference between craps on an island in Second Life and poker on an official Web-based betting site. If both sites offer betting on real-life sporting events, there's even less difference.

But the Web site will, these days, have gone through considerable time and money to set up its business. Gaming, even outside the US, is quite difficult to get into: licenses are hard to get, and without one banks won't touch you. Compared to that, the $3,800 and 12 to 14 hours a day Brighton's Anthony Smith told Information Week he'd invested in building his SL Casino World is risibly small. You have to conclude that there are only two possibilities. Either Smith knew nothing about the gaming business - if he did, he know that the US has repeatedly cracked down on online gambling over the last ten years and that ultimately US companies will be forced to decide to live within US law. He'd also have known how hard and how expensive it is to set up an online gambling operation even in Europe. Or, he did know all those things and thought he'd found a loophole he could exploit to avoid all the red tape and regulation and build a gaming business on the cheap.

I have no personal interest in gaming; risking real money on the chance draw of a card or throw of dice seems to me a ridiculous waste of the time it took to earn it. But any time you have a service that involves real money, whether that service is selling an experience (gaming), a service, or a retail product, when the money you handle reaches a certain amount governments are going to be interested. Not only that, but people want them involved; people want protection from rip-off artists.

The MySpace decision, however, is completely different. Child abuse is, rightly, illegal everywhere. Child pornography is, more controversially, illegal just about everywhere. But I am not aware of any laws that ban sex offenders from using Web sites, even if those Web sites are social networks. Of course, in the moral panic following the MySpace announcement, someone is proposing such a law. The MySpace announcement sounds more like corporate fear (since the site is now owned by News International) than rational response. There is a legitimate subject for public and legislative debate here: how much do we want to cut convicted sex offenders out of normal social interaction? And a question for scientists: will greater isolation and alienation be effective strategies to keep them from reoffending? And, I suppose, a question for database experts: how likely is it that those 29,000 profiles all belonged to correctly identified, previously convicted sex offenders? But those questions have not been discussed. Still, this problem, at least in regards to MySpace, may solve itself: if parents become better able to track their kids' MySpace activities, all but the youngest kids will surely abandon it in favour of sites that afford them greater latitude and privacy.

A dozen years ago, John Perry Barlow (in)famously argued that national governments had no place in cyberspace. It was the most hyperbolic demonstration of what I call the "Benidorm syndrome": every summer thousands of holidaymakers descend on Benidorm, in Spain, and behave in outrageous and sometimes lawless ways that they would never dare indulge in at home in the belief that since they are far away from their normal lives there are no consequences. (Rinse and repeat for many other tourist locations worldwide, I'm sure.) It seems to me only logical that existing laws apply to behaviour in cyberspace. What we have to guard against is deforming cyberspace to conform to laws that don't exist.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).