Does MISC-1220 address the new explosion in ads and land extortion?

It's evident to anyone who's toured the Mainland recently that the current "adfarm ban" has effectively separated the microparcel land extortion schemes from the problem of advertising blight, and both are now accelerating their spread across sims on all continents. As a result of this and other factors, Mainland prices are plummeting and more and more Mainland is for sale. This further accelerates the problems in a self-perpetuating downward spiral of market forces by which Mainland will eventually have no value and no avatars.

LL has been kicking around a "zoning" plan, with no details made public, except the apparent intent to only address new Mainland. At the same time, a group of advertisers has been floating the idea of licensing advertising in SL. Even these responsible advertisers, though, have had to resort to outrageously oversized builds in order to be seen in the clutter of microparcel junk in the environment. And nothing seems to be addressing the extortion schemes.

So I took a shot at it, with http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1220 (clickable link for some browsers: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1220.

Comments? Suggestions? (Votes, even?)

I like 2&4, the others, still deciding. I also think that somewhere along the line LL need to start with a new adult only rated continent, where access to all sims requires verification, and put decent zoning into it some how to seperate commercial, mixed and residential. Current landholders could tag they land as either residential or commercial, new buyers to the sim would only be able to retag their land to what had the majority of usage in the sim.

Yeah Adfarms are just covering the mainland, Andraca has been ruined by selfish slimey, snakebellied scum and bitch who have carved up the land along the road and set up advertising there. Long term residents there are selling up, I probably be not far behind them, just to let it become an adfarm sim. The damn temp rezzers are up, and they are dumb enough to believe 2 temp rez signs with in 20m with the same add will sell twice as much products.

I guess they think they are selling to ghosts.

I don’t think licensing advertising solves the problem
The people who win the licences will be the current people who blight the landscape the most. And this will legitimise them.

A better solution would be to make it an AR'able offence to have RL ad's on the mainland unless you own more than half the sim.

If you own half or more of the sim where the ad is its perfectly acceptable, as you are paying LL lots of money for ads in each sim, and will proberbly have to use your land to attract people to see your ads (which makes the mainland nicer)

It's true that licensing legitimatizes advertising, but it's just accepted at this point that "in-world display advertising works" and LL desperately wants to believe that SL can be a successful platform for advertising. Now, granted, looking at the current crop of ads, it's a mystery to me *how* it can possibly be working, but it's early days in the virtual world, and the current total lack of regulation pretty much ensures that whatever customers there may be for advertising on this platform will be spread out among uniformly unprofitable competitors. So, as long as advertising is accepted as viable in SL, there needs to be a way to make it co-exist with other uses of the Mainland, without being the Tragedy of the Commons that it is today.

Also, we know that most of the larger advertisers have land-extortion alts (or other special business relationships) that feed the synergy system of downward-spiraling land prices (and presumably subsidize what just must be hopelessly low-margin advertising), so addressing the advertising problem in isolation from the micro-parcel extortion rackets is really not an option.

One other thing I forgot to mention: the proposed jira is intended not to unduly inconvenience the "sim philatelists" who are collecting one postage-stamp parcel in each Mainland sim for hosting scripts and/or landing bots (or whatever they're doing).

[ETA: Further to the "licensing" thing, the current proposal from the advertising group would restict bidding on ad licenses to RL public companies who have demonstrated network advertising technology and pass some fiduciary scrutiny. To me, the free market is a better judge: If I win all the licenses in my sims, my in-world persona should be able to do with them what he wishes--including absolutely nothing whatsoever. If advertising is so viable, let it compete with the rest of the residents for the right to display, or not to display.]