Last January 22nd Linden Lab organized a press conference about the “integration” of XStreet SL and OnRez in Linden Lab. I was there and i think it was interesting, even what they said can be read in their press release. I wrote a post about this issue some days ago to.

Basically they said is a good investment for them, a way to improve SLeconomy and that they work to make it a better tool for sellers and customers. And i’m sure that’s right and i also think that, someway, i trust more having my money on a company part of Linden Lab than in the hands of someone i never met and i have no information about him. Integrating XStreet to the Second Life web page is something useful, specially for new residents. Also, after the questions of some of the people in the conference they talked about the possibility of expanding the DMCA that protects the rights of creators in Second Life to XStreet too, and that’s good news for sure.

After the questions they asked for comments about it, then i said:

Some people see this business movement as a “monopoly” in the sense you are closing OnRez leaving only, as big distributor, XStreet and also you are taking what was, possibly, the second bigger exchange system, the one in XStreet. Some people may also feel this as an intervention of Linden Lab over a residents business.

As answer to this comment, T Linden (who seemed a bit pissed off because the word “monopoly”) talked about the law restrictions to monopolies, also said we all (Lindens and residents) have to do a huge work trying to restore the confidence we had once .

Ok, possibly the use of the word “monopoly” is not exact in this case, because Armidi has their own web-sales system, because Apez.biz is still running and because they permit other residents create similar e-commerce tools. But we should consider that XStreet + OnRez means more than the 90% of the SL-e-commerce, and this integration means Linden Lab will have, in almost exclusivity, that market, controlling this way all the fees, commissions, content, etc… And even they say they are integrating OnRez in the system what they are doing actually is just to close it. Buying OnRez and closing it they are eliminating the alternative and the competition, and OnRez was an alternative mainly because they had no fees or commission over sales, XStreet had fees and will keep the fees, as Lindens said. At the same time, this way Linden Lab has a stronger control over SLcommerce and economy, so maybe is not a monopoly, maybe we can consider it a “nationalization” in the sense something resident owned is not resident owned anymore. And well, talking about anti-monopoly laws in an economy like the Second Life one is… well… not reasonable.

Surely i will use XStreet, but under my opinion is sure this integration will be good for Linden Lab, what i’m not sure about is if it will be good for the residents, time will tell us… And well, about the “work we have to do all together to improve communication and confidence”, please, let’s be serious. We are customers of Linden Lab so the confidence must be uni-directional, Linden Lab is who have to work to restore the confidence of their customers, not the customers (or residents) themselves. They closed much of the ways of communication, the Official Linden Blog is not a communication tool anymore becuase comments are closed. Forums are not easy to use and may be incredibly confusing. The last Town Hall (possibly only the old residents remember Town Halls) was after the “Open Letter” project in June 2007, and so on…

As always this is my opinion, nothing more and nothing less… but what is yours?

Image taken in the press conference by Radar Masukami and published under a Creative Commons License.