Reading around the SLblogosphere i saw some posts about SLeconomy. Some of them related or asking for more regulations in SLbusiness and economy.

I’d like to remark the really interesting post in Prad Prathivi’s blog, where Prad plead for a trusting system for SLbusinesses, some like the one in eBay, based on references of customers. Personally i find quite interesting the proposal of Prad, even, as he says too, it would be something quite different to do, technically and “socially”. In any case i strongly suggest the reading of the post (as most of Prad’s blog).

In the other side Grace McDunnough, in another quite interesting post, she pleads for a business license system in this case in order to regulate and increase the trust in business.

I’d like to share my view about all this, about regulations in SLbusiness. Every day we have in Second Life transactions for millions of L$ (what means thousands of US$) and the problems you can find are minimal, at least i don’t think is worse than economy in RL. Moreover most of the transactions have values under the equivalent of 10 US$, normally even less. If one have a problem in a purchase due to grid issues normally you shop owners give a solution in a reasonable time for one simple reason: if you don’t have good customer service you won’t have customers, as simple as this. Under my opinion the system works quite good for the 80 % of the transactions.

But, what happen when your transaction is bigger, when we talk about businesses of hundreds (even thousands) of US$ or €? I still think Linden Lab is doing ok keeping distance of this kind of economical relationships, this kind of businesses are RLeconomy, not SL even generated in Second Life. In this case i think the right thing is too sign a contract,and agreement or something legal like that. I think is more a question of common sense more than trust. To make big money business you need to have some information about your provider or customer, and of course, some legal protection in both cases. RL laws in most of the countries provide this legal protection. It seems for me that asking to Linden Lab to care about this kind of transactions is some like asking them to care about something you should care about.

One of the interesting things in Second Life is that anybody can start a business, big or small. The system itself works for most of the transactions, the RL legal system works for the biggest transactions. In my opinion there is no need of more regulations, a license system will just help bigger business and will damage micro-economy.

Image in this post by Ze Moo, licensed with a Creative Commons license.