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I just don't buy into the argument that Linden Lab should be the regulatory entity, who happens to not be doing a good job at it. Yes, SL has lots of oddities from an architectural perspective, and it creates policy problems that didn't exist (as such) before but that can easily be mapped to problems created by older technologies. More oddly, though, Linden Lab is in a strange situation of being both the developer of this general-purpose publishing & communication technology and the only host in town. That causes a lot of confusion.

The only reason why I'm investing my time here is because Second Life, unlike all other virtual worlds, has the potential of becoming like the Web -- and that means different organizations being able to run their own sim servers, just like they run their own web servers. In that scenario, it's pretty obvious that Linden Lab cannot (and should not) be the regulatory agent. The stuff they did with casinos is simply PR aspirin. Casinos will pop up again in sim servers run from jurisdictions that allow them. And bots will be a perfectly normal reality (they already are). Should Linden Lab regulate all of that? heck, no! There needs to be a W3C of sorts that defines a strong technical protocol, along with users taking legal action against fraud when it occurs. If I were LL, I would be speeding up the Open Source release of the server asap! -- that will clarify the confusion of responsibility that exists today and that LL is addressing with a sequence of aspirins.

Also, in the scenario that I'm describing (which is the one most companies are interested in), search and services like it cannot be done in a centralized manner like you were suggesting in a previous post.