Rumor: SecondLife Filters

The rumor mill is in overdrive.

Filters

Second Life to Add Country-Specific Filtering? says Philbert's talking country level filters for Second Life:

After social criticism over allegedly lewd speech, Linden Lab is apparently looking at building in a filtering tool to allow individual governments to add more control to Second Life. CEO and Founder Philip Rosedale discussed plans with German magazine, Focus. The Google translation is rough, but Rosedale says, “With it each government is to regulate to be able, its citizens in‚ Second Life to which laws' are subject."...

Some of the problems were with translation - so I immediately thought of Tao Takashi (who speaks better English than most people I know, too). Of course, Tao blogged it as well and blessed us with more than a paragraph. Part of his 2 cents:

...Reading this and having never heard of such plans before and reading the context I wonder if they haven’t mabe misunderstood something. Before that statement he talks about private island and how they can govern their estate themselves and the next sentence begins with “Therefore we want to include a filtering system into our software”. So maybe the english of the reporters wasn’t that good and they have mistaken the plans for a new abuse report system and age verification for a tool for real governments. Then again they have the example of germany and they stress the words “real governments” so maybe it is planned indeed.

I wonder if Anshe Chung would like the [w:China|Chinese] government filtering her access? I know I wouldn't like any government filtering my access. This is a matter of [w:network neutrality] on a whole new level.

Perhaps we should wait a few months and see what shows up in the official blog... or maybe that is being filtered too? Filters like that lead to a wonderful world where no one actually communicates. I mean, come on - look at the [w:United Nations]. Do we really want the countries who can't talk to each other regulating how we... talk to each other?

Time will tell, because Linden Lab... probably won't.