Metaverse Standards Which Don't Factor In Metaverse User Communities Aren't Worth Formulating - Update: Metaverse Pioneer Tony Parisi & MSF Host Neil Trevett Reply

Updates, 7/30:  Added feedback from Tony Parisi, who was metaversing before the Metaverse was cool, and Neil Trevett, VP of NVIDIA & President of the Khronos Group, the host of the Metaverse Standards Forum. Excerpts at the bottom of this post!

You may have noticed last week's announcement of the Metaverse Standards Forum, a consortium of companies and organizations anchored by Meta, Epic, and other industry leaders, proposing to create universal standards for metaverse platforms going forward:

The Metaverse Standards Forum aims to foster consensus-based cooperation between diverse SDOs and companies to define and align requirements and priorities for metaverse standards—accelerating their availability and reducing duplication of effort across the industry.

“The metaverse will bring together diverse technologies, requiring a constellation of interoperability standards, created and maintained by many standards organizations,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president. “The Metaverse Standards Forum is a unique venue for coordination between standards organizations and industry, with a mission to foster the pragmatic and timely standardization that will be essential to an open and inclusive metaverse.”

I didn't blog about it last week, because I was waiting to receive an answer to the questions I sent to their press contact:

• How will the Forum incorporate input from metaverse platform user communities?
• How will the Forum incorporate input from metaverse content creators within these communities?

No answers yet, which is strange. But then again, the Metaverse Standards Forum's site says little or nothing about what makes metaverse platforms worthwhile, and possible in the first place: The user communities who develop and evolve within them, and have an equal stake in their future.

In general, talk of metaverse standards make a fundamental mistake: Treating the technology as if it were simply like the world wide web. But by definition, a metaverse platform is social -- it's an immersive realm for interacting with other people. And creating content with them. And forming communities with them. But as standards are usually presented and discussed, metaverse interoperability misses the core realization that people and the communities they create, not any technology stack, make metaverse platforms meaningful.  

And a whole host of metaverse platform community standards have yet to be decided. For instance:

• What universal special responsibilities do metaverse platforms have to users under 18 and their adult guardians?
• What universal rights should metaverse users have around their privacy, their data, and the content they create?
• What universal principles should shape how metaverse users are fairly compensated for the content they create on a given platform, and their rights to that content across multiple platforms?

That's just very much for starters. And many of the key technical topics around standards also impact the community. As my my colleague Tom Boellstorff  just put it: "It really is worrisome how Meta and other folks are trying to set forth their surveillance capitalism model as 'interoperability'."

Questions like these are just as crucial to the future of the Metaverse as technical questions around 3D file formats and scripting. They may even be somewhat more easy to establish -- technology capacities change from year to year, but the need to treat people fairly never goes away.

The need is pressing right now. There's a backlash among indie developers Meta's Quest store commissions, which are incredingly high. Think the Forum can help resolve that, when Meta is a lead participant?

In fairness, the Forum just announced itself, and these community topics may still come up. Also in fairness, lead Forum member Tony Parisi did emphasize user communities in his own statement on the announcement:

“Lamina1 is committed to an open Metaverse for all— controlled by no one, with no barriers to entry, and where creators from all walks of life can succeed and thrive,” said Tony Parisi, chief strategy officer at Lamina1. “We are excited to work in collaboration with industry leaders to define the interoperable standards and infrastructure that empower real-time 3D for community, communication and commerce on a global scale.”

Tony, notably, is also a team leader for Lamina1, the new startup co-founded by Neal Stephenson, And Stephenson himself just called for metaverse platform users to rally for standards that protect them:

Pictured: The Second Life tax revolt of 2003 (re-enacted for Wired)

Every time you input data to a social media site, you're giving free IP to whoever runs that site... And AR/VR devices are going to have much more sophisticated ways of extracting information from your usage habits... I just don't think we should let them do that. So I'm onboard with the idea that we need the equivalent of labor unions. Because we're all workers in these factories -- anyone who uses social media. If General Motors opened a car factory and just asked people to show up and build cars for them for free, nobody would take that as a serious proposition, but it's kinda what we're all doing.

So I think a better system is one that would look kinda the way that manufacturing looked after labor unions entered the picture, where the people who've been contributing their free labor have some kind of collective bargaining power and as such, are part of the process, in helping to improve the product. As opposed to just throwing their data over a blank wall.

Metaverse platform activism like this has already happened -- most famously, in the Second Life tax revolt of 2003, where user protest led Linden Lab to change its policies around pricing. It continues happening on an informal basis across many (all?) platforms, as metaverse communities with them are roiled by the latest policy, tech, and monetization changes. And unless the Metaverse Standards Forum considers those communities when formulating those standards, we should expect still more turmoil.

UPDATE: Reply from Tony below:

1. Khronos is really good. We have a long track record in shipping successful tech standards.

— Tony Parisi.eth 🇺🇦🌻 #SlavaUkraini (@auradeluxe) June 29, 2022

"It’s not Khronos’ or this new Forum’s job to establish business models or ethics. This is up to the member companies. I imagine we can be a starting point for vibrant discussions though. Several Forum member companies are already leading lights in the industry when it comes to advocating for different business models and more appropriate revenue splits — Epic in particular has been vocal in pushing for more sound revenue splits. Unity doesn’t even take a cut."

That could well be the case, but consider it this way: What if, at the dawn of social media companies, Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, and Facebook all got together agreed not only on interoperability standards, but on standards of conduct around how they would monetize and treat its users' data?

Hi Wagner – 100% agreed - successful standards are responsive to the creator & user communities that use them. The Metaverse Standards Forum is free and open to all, including user groups and advocacy organizations, and Forum activities will be driven by its membership.

— Neil Trevett (@neilt3d) June 30, 2022

UPDATE, 2: Neil Trevett, VP of NVIDIA & President of the Khronos Group, the host of the Metaverse Standards Forum, says this:

"100% agreed - successful standards are responsive to the creator & user communities that use them. The Metaverse Standards Forum is free and open to all, including user groups and advocacy organizations, and Forum activities will be driven by its membership."

So that's good. However, as I reply in the tweet, the MSF website makes little or no mention of creator and user communities, and encourages membership from "companies, standards organizations, industry associations or universities". Hopefully that wording can change, because metaverse platforms have thousands of creators who now make a fulltime living (or much more!) from them, and user communities with tens of thousands of members.

Comments

[Zoe]

I'm so so tired of seeing the word metaverse now, it's all buzz words, the words that excite media and people who make useless policies and make life complicated with their legislations and rules, I worked in the care sector for a while, mental health, and during my training I was actually taught "buzz words" to use in paperwork, reports and such, and all this fuss about the metaverse (gags) just sounds like the whole buzz word thing, everyone wants to be the next one to create the new buzz, frickin "meta-bs", that's all it is, a race to be next buzzword and who can trademark it.

[Jan Hajek]

I think this summarizes it: https://twitter.com/hajekj/status/1539516188002291715

[Adeon Writer]

Calling anything a Metaverse these days is just shooting yourself in the foot.

Any company with a reasonably in-touch PR team knows to avoid the term entirely, especially if they're on the bleeding-edge of VR or Virtual Worlds.

[Summer Haas]

The metaverse became cool? I must have missed the news article about when that happened.

[Matt]

Well, the metaverse is highly beneficial for businesses, so it will be there, whether we want it or not.