Peering Inside: Linden Lab's new billing provider
Filed under: Opinion, Second Life, Peering Inside
Some of you may have noticed that your billing for Second Life is no longer being done out of the United Kingdom but is now being done from the USA. Since there was no announcement of a change, we asked Linden Lab about that, back in the first week of January -- especially as it seemed that some users were still being billed from the UK, and others from the USA (and a few users with multiple accounts, from both countries). There seemed to be little consistency.
Within a week, we had a basic answer. Linden Lab's John Zdanowksi (Zee Linden) responded, "There was shift in billing, though the change only happened for new customers or existing customers who re-entered their billing information, so that there would be no chance of disruption."
We went back to the users who had alerted us of the change (some of whom had been disrupted by it) and asked them what sorts of things they wanted to know. We quickly identified the basic questions: Who was the new billing provider; why the change; when was it done; and why it hadn't been announced. We boiled the queries down and sent them along to Linden Lab's PR agency.
Months went by without a response. Finally, in mid-March, we re-sent the query and were finally told, "This is not information that Linden Lab is currently making public."
Pardon? The name of the billing provider and the date that they started billing for Linden Lab are being kept confidential?
Apparently yes.
Why should these details be kept hidden? Without them, if you re-entered your billing details, your next billing could fail due to lack of authorization.
Well, gentle readers -- this one has strained even the awesome powers of the Massively Deductive Reasoning Collective -- help us out a little here.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jacek Antonelli said on 10:52AM 5-12-2008
Maybe they want to... err.
Maybe it's all part of their plan to... hrmm.
Maybe... well, drat. I can't think of any good reason why they'd feel the need to keep their billing provider a secret from their customers.
(Unless, maybe, it's one with a really bad reputation, and they want to delay another public relations nightmare. But I'd hope that they wouldn't deliberately choose one with a bad reputation!)
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Adz Childs said on 11:04AM 5-12-2008
Integrity does billing now?
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Dedric Mauriac said on 12:49PM 5-12-2008
I remember back last summer when they started billing from the UK. My credit card company flagged my card as potential fraud. I had found out the embarrassing way that my card was flagged and had to jump through hoops to find out why the card wasn't working.
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Ric Mollor said on 10:08AM 5-13-2008
Sometime in the past the billing provider they were using was blocked by many CC companies and created difficulties for those wishing to set up an account.
Perhaps the change in billing was to rectify those problems. Though the logic of not making the change public seems strange.
Unless the previous provider had it's security breached and a large amount of data was stolen. It would make sense for LL to try to distance itself from that.
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Jamie David said on 7:58AM 5-14-2008
As noted above maybe this change is to get around the troubles that old billing had with credit card companies. I had to change banks and cards as my main bank and their VISA rep saw issues with the billing system and blocked them as a merchant.
What I see as an issue is now that they are billing back in the good old USA what about VAT? Many in europe and the UK have been charged up to 20 percent tax. No that the money is not going to europe but the US VAT should no longer apply.
If they do still apply VAT then the name of the company who is doing the billing is most important. Europeans will need to know that the tax is being paid on their behalf and not pocketed.
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Tateru Nino said on 8:03AM 5-14-2008
The VAT's still due, technically. It's a requirement of the EC for doing business with EU citizens, intended to level the playing-field for EU businesses and make them more competitive.
Well, so long as they're not relying on services from outside the EU, anyway (which they can then no longer get as cheaply as citizens of other nations).