When I mentioned that metaverse platform CEOs should prepare to testify under oath before Congress soon, that was not an exaggeration: In fact, that very thing already happened in 2008, with Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale. (Wearing a suit for the first time that I'm aware of since meeting him in 2003!)
Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), who chairs the subcommittee, seems to have a surprisingly solid understanding of virtual worlds. He described virtual worlds as a “glimpse into future [and] a window into current reality for millions of people.” He noted that “at their best, virtual worlds are vehicles for understanding across boarders and in communities.” The concerns he listed were also on point: consumer protection, intellectual property protection, online banking, gambling, and child protection.
Most of those concerns are still concerning, and yet to be adequately addressed!
Read the whole 2008 summary/analysis from lawyer and virtual law blogger Benjamin Duranske. (Who interestingly enough, later went on to become Chief Compliance Officer at metaverse-developer Facebook.)
Philip's appearance was a friendly fact-finding one, but that was when metaverse platforms like Second Life only had hundreds of thousands of active users. Now they're used by nearly half a billion people, the plurality of whom are minors in the United States. (And in the US, minors enjoy a special legally protected status.) So the next time subpoenas start flying, CEOs should expect the questions they get from Congress to be much more pointed.
How Much of "The Metaverse" Concept Was Made as a Literary Device?
Is "the Metaverse" as we typically understand it mainly made as a literary device, i.e. to tell a cool fun story? On that theme, here's an interesting couple of reader comments inspired by Gabe Newell's skepticism over the Metaverse (at the least in its current incarnations) -- first from Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, who helped launch the university's virtual world campus:
Reader Martin K. expands on this, arguing that a lot of the specific features attributed to the Metaverse, such as a vast contiguous virtual world, were also invented to make a cyberpunk story cooler:
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Posted on Monday, March 14, 2022 at 02:40 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (3)
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