Second Life is widely considered to be a platform, or a service, or a service-oriented platform. Pick whichever one pleases you. It's the disparity between points of view that causes interesting frictions to occur. A key frictional surface involves griefing, open registration, and abuse-reporting/response.

How these systems can and should scale and evolve into the future depends a lot on how you see Second Life – as a service, or as a platform.

One day, at work, a web-server got vandalized. The front page was defaced, and much of the other content wiped. The systems team had all the content backed up, and worked to bring the server back up, while simultaneously keeping the data intact for a forensic investigation of how the break-in occurred, so that they could plug the hole. After all, they didn't want to have to do this again.

I was in the office of my boss, handing over a time/cost estimate of the work yet to do, and he glowered at the figures, and then at me.

"Get me the phone number for this Tim Berners-Lee chappie!" he said, "We're paying for this damn World Wide Web service, and for that sort of money, I expect them to provide some security against this sort of thing."

I knew him too well to try to explain things. I found a number and sent it on to him. I don't know if he ever called. If he did, and you're reading this, Tim, I'm sorry. You know and I know that he just didn't understand.

What's that got to do with Second Life? Well, Linden Lab appear to see Second Life from a platform perspective. Imagine it like the World Wide Web. The WWW is full of good people, bad people, sites and site operators. The Internet Rule of the Sandbox applies to the WWW as it did to the text-based virtual worlds before it. In short "If you don't like the rules, play somewhere else. If you play here, follow the rules."

Site operators remove or ban people who break the rules (for any reason or no reason). Site-operators who are seen as arbitrary or mendacious lose all their visitors. Site operators who are seen as fair keep them and attract more. Of course someone who is banned or barred from a site on the web may come back in another guise. That happens. There are ways of limiting it, but not preventing it.

In Second Life, the site operator is the land-owner, or anyone the land-owner delegates via group-permissions. Linden Lab seems to see the view where each 'site operator' (land owner or land officer) basically decides what they will and won't permit on their own turf based solely on their own discretion, and that (aside from the Terms of Service and Community Standards) they have no obligation to anyone else in that matter, other than by choice.

Primarily, disciplinary action in Second Life, just as on the web is taken against a virtual identity, not against the person. On the web, action taken isn't global either. You don't say, "Well, sorry Mrs Kent – you made an ass of yourself on a web-forum. You're not allowed to use the WWW anymore." There's always other sandboxes and other rules. Some people won't fit in anywhere, by their own choices. Most people find sandboxes and rules and operators that they are compatible with.

That strongly suggests that Linden Lab will -- in the long term -- start to do away with bans altogether, settling for either suspensions or legal charges. Groups of residents, among themselves, may form resident governments, but only over land that they control, with powers and punishments (within the Terms of Service/Community Standards) limited to what members of those groups agree to abide by or by banishment from the land.

Will a broad resident government ever form? Perhaps it could, but it would take the willing participation of each and every member. People like myself with no interest in resident government or governance would be exempt, and the government would be irrelevant except when I spent my time on their turf. Just about every group that owns land constitutes governance over their land, just as site-operators on the web constitute governance over their sites and servers and willing visitors.

All of this is predicated on being able to use a set of tools that give land-holders choices about how and what policies they want to apply to access to their land.

If you look on Second Life as a service, you probably want more tools, better tools, and Linden Lab to shut down open registration, and come down harder and faster on people who misbehave.

Linden Lab don't see it that way. They look at Second Life like the WWW, and focus on providing security features that we can choose to apply in any way we see fit, and opening the platform up for anyone to use. It works for the WWW; why not for Second Life?

Fast forward N years. The Second Life Grid platform is populated by simulators and simulator groups, islands and continents run by individuals, groups, businesses and non-profits. Each one sets the rules for their regions.

The central land-masses of all of this are 'Second Life', grown much, much larger than the three continents it is now, but still operating under the basic Terms of Service and Community Standards, as it always had, with individual landowners layering on their own rules (as they do already). Other areas on the broader grid, outside Second Life's sims have their own governments, their own rules and covenants, all created and enforced by the region owners.

Assuming Second Life is ultimately a big success, that seems to leave room for everyone, in the long term.