I’m told that openSim is a platform, not a world. And I have this idea that my avatar travels in worlds, not across a platform, so I want to know how I’m going to understand the redefinitions of the spaces that I enter: do you drive on the same side of the road? What are my rights? What content protection is there? How do I know who’s who, and whether they’re real, and whether I know them from somewhere else and can trust them?

And I’m sure the openSim people are thinking hard about this, adding modules and plug-ins, making sure the platform part is a clean slate, even going so far as to remove the stuff that’s “too much like Second Life” so that it’s clear that the SL features aren’t part of the platform, they’re part of the worlds built on top.

I guess it’s good – world building should be our right, dammit – why kowtow to some other platform owner when you can kowtow to yourself, and invite some friends over for tea and then ban them or listen to their whining in your forums. You’ve always wanted to be a Linden, right? Well, now’s your chance.

But I feel a sense of loss, perhaps, at the possibilities afforded by having ONE world model to chew over, and one TOS to read, and one code of conduct to remember. But aside from being a little too simple-minded to keep more than one world in mind at a time, I worry that perhaps the possibilities of the Metaverse get lost while we focus on what protocols should drive the platform – we’re leaving the policy stuff that those protocols imply to others, later.

I’m really not in a position to really know what the AWG folks are talking about, I get lost whenever something codey comes up. So maybe they DO have the big picture in mind. All I have are my own feelings about what bugs me and what I want to do and two models to point to about what works and what doesn’t: Second Life, and the Internet.

How Secure Are We
So I’m reading the New York Times today and there’s this security leak thing, some kind of hole in the Internet that hackers can drive through and before you know it you’re swiping your credit card across some Web site that you think is Amazon.com but is really a couple of guys in their basement somewhere, or maybe not basement – maybe it’s a lot more organized than I think and the hackers have a head office somewhere with sleek chrome and potted plants.

Whatever – point is there’s something broken, and they’ll fix it, I guess, but what jumps out at me is the following:

The online flaw and the rush to repair it are an urgent reminder that the Internet remains a sometimes anarchic jumble of jurisdictions. No single person or group can step in to protect the online transactions of millions of users.

We Wanted You To Be Free, Really!
See, in many ways the Net wasn’t designed for users. It was designed to make it easier for publishers to make content available, with the idea being that by linking it up it could become more robust more meaningful, new stuff could be added. It was built to allow that content to be ‘always on’.

Remember way back when, they called it the Information Superhighway? It wasn’t the “Personal Information Navigation System” or the “Secure Commerce Engine” or even “Telephone V 2.0″, all that stuff sort of came later, and we ended up with a sort of cobbled together mess of wires and optical fibre and a domain registration system that, it turns out, had some holes in it that network folks are right now trying to plug so the hackers don’t have a field day with our credit cards.

We wanted information to be free. Who you were, who hosted it, how stuff was authenticated, how decisions were made – all that stuff would sort itself out, water always runs downhill or whatever, the ecosystem or the hive or whatever its called would come to grips with the issues and just sort of patch them up and ship out a new version.

Spam, Systems and Net Neutrality
I’m with Prok on this one. Net neutrality is a ridiculous concept. If I use more of a resource, I should pay for it.

How bandwidth hogs get charged for being hogs is a whole other issue – maybe the pipe shouldn’t just get shut off, maybe it should be metered, or the people serving up all that bandwidth metered….whatever, someone has to pay.

But whether you agree with net neutrality or not, the fact is that there’s no easy way to manage the mess. Sure, commerce will always charge what the market will bear, consumers will always pay for stuff they’re, well, willing to pay for – but what could be easy in conception can be difficult in the execution. You need systems to execute policies, not philosophies.

OK, so here’s a promise. I promise to eliminate spam. Within 2 years. I have the means, I’ve identified the technology. I know how to do it and maybe I even have a fair bit of clout to get the ball rolling. You can even quote me:

“Two years from now, spam will be solved.”

Only thing is, I stole this line from Bill Gates. And he said it in 2004.

He never quite GOT the whole open source thing. He called it communism. I mean, in HIS view, spam could be killed by actually charging MONEY to the spammers. In his model:

People would set a level of monetary risk – low or high, depending on their choice – for receiving e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turns out to be from a long-lost relative, for example, the recipient would charge nothing. But if it is unwanted spam, the sender would have to fork over the cash.

“In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant,” Gates predicted.

How wrong poor Bill was. Mind you, “he conceded, however, that his prognostications have not always been on the mark. Notable misjudgments include the rising popularity of open-source software, epitomized by Linux, and the success of the Google search engine.”

Regardless of whether Bill was right, or Bill was wrong, he bumped up against two things when it came to ridding the world of spam: 1) the Internet wasn’t built with any thought for whether we might like to properly protect ourselves from the cruel, the commercial, the scammers or the ever-growing penis enlargement industry and 2) the “open Net” gang wouldn’t hear of it anyways.

Philosophy of Space
Tim Berner-Lee recently highlighted how the Web part and the semantic part of the semantic Web work together. The Web itself was build on “the philosophy of a navigable space, with a mapping from URI to resources. He stressed that a URI was an identifier for a resource, and not a recipe for its retrieval.”

The semantic part is retrieval.

And in some ways, the Web was a half-finished engine, at least in his view, although it was only in retrospect perhaps that the missing piece could be fleshed out.

Doesn’t matter – and frankly, half of this stuff is beyond me, I still don’t entirely understand XML, I just want to be able to find things and think that somehow that should be a lot easier.

But much as the NY Times article points out that today’s security breach was because of a “broader problem of the lack of security in the Domain Name System, which was invented in 1983 and was not created with uses like online banking in mind”, Berner-Lee’s comment points out that the Web gave us navigable space but didn’t give us the proper tools for information retrieval.

Is The Metaverse More Than the Net?
One of the perplexing questions about the 3D Web is whether it will be embedded “in” the Web, whether it’s separate from it, or whether the two sort of co-mingle like tentative lovers.

Google’s Lively gives us contained little spaces within a Web site. Within those little spaces are media objects culled from the Web. Objects in the spaces will be the equivalent of ads, ads around the spaces will feed off the objects, it’s a happy dance between the Web and a 3D space.

Similarly, you may need a client to get into openSim, but it’s all about the interconnections really – not just between Second Life and other grids, but between other grids and data depositories, and Lotus Notes, and HTML on a prim.

So does this all mean that the Metaverse, as embodied in openSim anyways, should simply be a bunch of protocols and systems but that in the end it’s following the Web’s lead? I wonder.

The Metaverse, or virtual world platforms, could lift off of the decisions made in how the Net has evolved or they could take a close look at whether this is an opportunity to fix some wrongs. And while they’re at it, to consider whether there are larger policy issues at play that are somehow different in virtual worlds than on the larger Net: issues like whether 3D content is a new type of asset, whether our avatars are somehow more meaningful or perhaps a place where we can hold a deeper repository of personal information, and how an “open and free” platform mindset can be reconciled with those nutty “make money and protect my privacy” folks who probably secretly still admire Bill Gates instead of Sergei and that other guy.

Couldn’t Fix It Then, Can’t Fix It Now
So for now I’ll leave this an open question.

I strongly feel that the concept of the avatar as the primary instrument for accessing virtual worlds should be more deeply considered. In my mind, it’s not just a question of authenticating who I am, or switching from one “shirt” to another when I move from one space to another, it’s about using the avatar as a deeper representation of your relationship to information and space.

What intrigues me are the possibilities opened up as the ‘metaverse’ opens up, or becomes more ubiquitous. Because we can draw lessons from the wider Web. We can try not to repeat history instead of hooking ourselves to that particular star. We can ask whether a dozen years from now we’ll be repeating the experience of Berners-Lee and sort of muttering about why we hadn’t thought through what 3D object tagging SHOULD look like instead of solely focusing on, as he called it, the ‘philosophy of navigable space’.

And we can kick ourselves because instead of checking them in at the door, we let the spammers and the bots in when we knew all along that they were coming.