Offshore SL: Good Idea or Not?

Just an idea I thought I'd throw out. I know I have no say in this whatsoever, but I was wondering if you all thought it might be a good idea for LL to move offshore to get away from all these laws that seem to crop up and risk or ruin the quality of the SL experience.

First there was the Ageplay thing, not personally my cup of tea, but if they can ban ageplay, what's next? Well, we now know what was next, gambling. Now, you won't even be able to run an sexually oriented or violent business on MATURE land or even your own mature-rated PRIVATE islands without first banning those who won't verify their ages, in an environment that isn't even supposed to be used by those under 18 to begin with.

So, if LL decided to take the plunge, shut down the grid for a few weeks, and set up shop on an abandoned offshore oil rig (offshore oil rigs are better for computer oriented businesses, as retrofitting them for the controlled environment needed for large numbers of expensive servers, is often easier and cheaper than most offshore islands, or so I've read), or a tropical island with laws making it a privacy haven, would you support this? Would you feel the cost of illegal entities using Lindens to fund their activities would be more of an inconvenience than loosing the right to visit a casino? If you've worked in offshoring businesses, I'd like to know if it would even be possible for LL to do (I haven't a clue, as I have VERY little knowledge of offshore business ventures, outside of what is commonly showcased in mainstream American media, and some PBS documentaries.

The ageplay issue was to do with Germany.

The gambling issue was to do with the US.

Moving the servers therefore wouldn't make much of a difference unfortunately. They are looking to move to a system whereby if something is illegal in your country, you won't be able to partake in it. Not sure how they'll be able to achieve that but that has been mentioned.

Not a good idea.

*shrugs* No matter what, the coutnries where the customers live (ie you and me) can still dictate laws to LL. They can do this by blocking access to LL over the net. Yes, porn sites do this all the time, but they are fly-by-night sites that can afford to. LL is a major company and can not "hide" in the same mannor.

Dodging to an offshore site may very well galvanise some of those just letting LL slide by. Taking such a blantant course to avoid laws, may very well crack them down harder.

While I may not agree with how LL does a lot of things, their stance on following legality and maintaining that over international borders is something I do think they are doing to the best of their ability. The taking out of "wagering" is a prime example. LL left it go for a long time, but was finally forced into it, not so much directly by the law, but by the laws for CC companies. Either LL complied by shutting down gambling, or the CC companies stoppped all payments to LL. And they can still do that even if LL moves offshore.

~Jessy

You're also not considering the fact that the people that run SL are from America and probably enjoy being in America from time to time. If they offshore the company, they'd have to move themselves and everyone in their lives that they'd like to continue seeing offshore as well. Companies and people that run offshore internet businesses that violate US laws are still subject to those laws if they come to the US. People running online gambling companies and even companies that process payments for online gambling companies have been arrested for trying to visit the US. If you are willing to leave everyone and everyplace you've ever known behind and never return, then you are welcome to start your own alternative to SL in some offshore facility.

Comes the day of open source and open grid, and this discussion becomes moot. Then, there can be servers in Ust Kamenogorsk or Tijuana, and then whatever happens in Tijuana will stay in Tijuana.

Please explain. How will open source and open grid fix this. I mean, if the companies that owned the Peer-2-Peer filesharing software can be held accountable even though they had increasingly less and less control over what was traded, how could opening the grid fix probs? Just curious. I hope you are correct, that open source and open grid would work, but how exactly?

Sounds prohibitively expensive for a private company without a lot of cash flow. Yeah so you can air condition the rooms, but what about laying all that cabling? What're you gonna do, run SL through satellites? And then you have to pay to fly employees to/from the oil rig, and I seriously doubt LL can afford to pay employees enough to work 2 week on/2 week off shifts, let alone either maintain a fleet of aircraft and boats, or contract with an existing carrier. Then you'd have to hire some sort of maintenance crew to monitor the rig itself (what happens during a hurricane?) as well as environmental impact. Whatever governmental department regulates international waters will be breathing down your neck, making damn sure you don't dump dead batteries/motherboards/sewage into the ocean. You'd have to run your own sewer system, kitchen, showers, etc, which means WATER and its transportation and storage; water is heavy and not fun to keep separate from ocean water. You'd have to buy all food supplies for your employees, too, and furniture for them to use (bunkbeds?)

I can guarantee that LL doesn't have this sort of money. If it went public, perhaps, but even then the shareholders might not like the idea.

It would probably be cheaper to just throw lobbyist cash at the problem than moving the operation offshore.

Wouldn't work. Lobbyist cash got the gambling ban in the first place. RL gambling institutions and lotteries lost too much money with online gambling. Yes, internet gambling was feeding gambling addictions and attracting and kids to gambling, but that wasn't a major issue, it was just the face that was put on the bill in order to get the anti-vice people onboard. The ugly truth was State Lotteries, Horse Racing Tracks, Indian Casinos and the like were loosing money, when people didn't have to leave their homes to gamble.

In short, there are cadres of interest groups that like gambling, adult content, and ageplay bans and restrictions, and nobody even gives a fig about protecting children or the risk of fraud. These groups have way more money. So LL wouldn't have a prayer of winning a lobbying war with them.

As for the oil rig thing, that was just an idea. Like I said, I don't know much about offshoring other than some companies who specialize in computer resources do do that abandoned oil rig thing.

Doesn't solve abit, even you might able to host a sim in Tijuana, you inventory server is probably still maintain by LL somewhere in the Western Countries. And anyway, do you really think those countries has enough bandwidth to handle the traffic.. if you feel lag now a day while all the servers are in a serveal main locations, imagine when you have the servers all over the places.

Not sure why some of the people thinks that if the server code is open source, everyone could host their own sim at home. Even now a day, ISP is very strict in their TOS about hosting website using your DSL/Cable (Most of them DOES NOT allow and even block port 80). why would you think that they will allow you to host something which will generate 10 times traffic??

Hosting is the answer to this problem. That is, you wouldn't necessarily be hosting your own sim at home, you could be renting a server at a hosting company. With OS that company does not need to be LL. In all such matters, competition is usually a Good Thing.

And a distributed network is almost always more robust than a centralized single server. More robust in terms of avoiding overwhelming outages, and also more robust in matters of security and yes, politics.

However, the day WILL come when your sim will be in your keychain memory stick, and people will be using cell phones with keyboards to connect to it. Whether that day is near or far remains to be seen.

Regardless of what anyone is saying. The reality is that there could be a Las Vegas in SL---that no one would care about---were it not for the fact that the Linden$ can be converted to real money!

Remove that and all troubles are solved and SL can go back to being a fun place to create and play, instead of a attempt to create just another vehicle of online commerce.

I know the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum reality has been refined a good deal lately but I have to ask: what planet is this on, then? What makes you think that the control freaks will somehow use less smarts and less processing power than the libertines? Sorry, but D'oh!

You keep posting this but it's just not correct. It's not even close to that simple. Please read the many responses folks have posted to this claim, and try to understand them. I'll try one more time, as briefly as I can: As long as any company provides a service paid for by a US credit card or wire transfer, that service must not allow gambling for anything of value--whether that value is convertible to currency or not. And that service in the case of LL includes membership and tier; L$ purchase is beside the point.

(Offshoring is also irrelevant, as has been exhaustively addressed in about a hundred threads before this.)

I'm sorry, but this constant, repetitive pining for the halcyon days of gambling is really getting tiresome.

IF SL was moved off shore it wouldnt bring gambling and Age Play back.

Anyone who thinks it would really hasnt been paying attention to discussions at all.

The only solution would be to have secretive offline world that no one knew about it where you could do whatever providing FBI didn't catch on hack your computer server and arrest you. If you had large sums of money going on through Paypal they report this to IRS if they wasn't good explaination of where or how the money were being made they could investigate if they thought you were involved in criminal activity that could be potential "terrorist" activity even if it wasn't since 9/11 thing. American government loves spying on its citzens and getting involved with what is being earned by certain groups of people outside of their do not tax circles..
If you're not American but dealt with Americans you still be spied on.

Remove that and you get your gambling back at the expense of every other business that exists. You don't seem to care about that.

It would be very possible for someone to create a gambling system that instead of using L$ would simply have points ... go up to the slot machine or roulette table or whatever, and get a certain number of points, say 100. Gamble, using the points, until you either hit zero or decide to stop. At the end, you have your total points and maybe get your name on a list of the Top Ten High Scores. But the points have no value otherwise ... you cant buy prim hair with them, you can't pay your shop rent with them, etc. It's all self-contained as part of the gaming system.

That would be close to what you're suggesting ... think many people would come play it?

Maybe they would. But a lot of people who gamble are not just playing for fun, they're playing in hopes of winning something they can trade elsewhere for other things, or cash out.

Why don't the Lindens buy their very own island and declare it as a State, they keen to make us believe it's a good idea to do

Linden Nation! With King Phillip and His Minions (us).

I don't pretend to be expert about any of this, but it looks to me pretty straightforward. Slimey Crooke gets his server hosted in Tijuana and pays whatever fees, etc. LL charges to operate "his" island. Everything on his server is legal in his country (in Tijuana I suppose that means paying off, er, buying licenses from the local officials and police, but the nature of such local practice is irrelevant here). Let us say US citizens take their avatars to Slimey's server in Tijuana just like some US citizens take their physical selves to Tijuana, and do God knows what there.

Unless there is US money involved in things that are illegal in the US and done by US citizens, everyone is off the US legal hook as far as I can see, in particular LL. Same for every other country in the world.

If there is money involved, like in, say, gambling, it becomes a problem of enforcement. Already, in the US, we see Internet transactions where US people buy stuff in the US and don't pay any state sales tax because the seller has no assets or operations in the taxing state and can safely ignore the taxman. The US' leverage over LL in the gambling case seems to be US ability to act against credit card companies, banks, and Paypal, which could indirectly but very effectively shut down SL. Slimey needs to get around that.

So ol' Slimey stays in Tijuana and doesn't go north to San Diego where the Feds could arrest him, and so does his server. No big problem; from what I hear, things are more interesting in Tijuana anyway. Then the US first has to prove that US citizens gambled on his server. That done, they still have to find a way to shut him down. And who says he will have to cash out via US companies? Or even US dollars, provided SL traffic gets big enough to support independent currency exchanges?

Doesn't Mexico (and nearly every country) have an extradition agreement with the US? Hopefully Slimey's not a US citizen...

Completely missing the often raised points that - no matter where a gambling site is located US Credit Card companies are not allowed to issue payments to it.

I've grown rather fond of Slimey at this point... but I'm concerned he may have a problem getting CitiGroup to keep processing credit card payments to him. I think if he stays under the radar screen, it's fine, but as I understand it, it's illegal for US credit card companies to make payments to any internet gambling service, even foreign. (I know it happens--I just don't think it's legal, and it's the credit card companies that are at risk.)

Now, I think Slimey could have stayed in Van Nuys, if only he could get the money in cash somehow. To stay legal, Slimey needs better mafia connections, to get access to the "corner bookie" network.

Who said he has to use US credit card companies?

US customers would.