Asking again - why no middle ground on pricing?

My last post went unanswered (actually my last two questions have not been answered), so I will rephrase as succinctly as possible:

In the interest of servicing both the needs of corporate clients and individuals, would it be possible for you to have more than one level of pricing for private islands, depending on use? You are already extending this courtesy to educational institutions - why not also extend it to individuals?

I think the answer to this question is that most people at Linden Lab feel that a tax or penalty on corporations would be an unhelpful complication of the pricing system. In my mind the reasons are:

(1) It would be difficult to enforce: some individuals play in SL like they are a corporation, and some corporations would be using SL in the same way that many individuals do. How someone uses their region might change over time from 'individual' behavior to 'corporate' behavior. Where to draw the line?

(2) Since the line will not be clear the policy would probably open up a new channel of petitions and complaint that we would have to deal with, where somone complains that someone else is doing corporate things but is recieving an individual's rate, and the other way around. This would increase the set of problems we would have to deal with, and we would ultimately have to hire more people to deal with the increased load.

(3) It would generate a lot of "Linden Answers" posts asking us why do we have a tax/penalty on corporations, which would all be harder to answer than this question.


The discount on educational purposes is relatively easy to justify. It values education in general which is a Good Thing for the real world, and it encourages exploration into the educational possibilities of SL which will help it grow into a true tool and platform, which is a Good Thing for Linden Lab, and ultimately for SL.