A note: Everyone’s talking about the metaverse. And as someone who has spent their whole career at the nexus of politics, technology and regulation, I’ve found myself asking the question: how are we going to regulate the metaverse? In an attempt to answer that, I’ve spent the last month researching and having open discussions with my team about what that could look like.
What follows is a result of those discussions. The memo breaks down the hard questions policymakers should be thinking about now - before it’s too late. As we have often seen with all types of emerging technology, especially social media platforms, regulators always arrive too late to the game. Now is the time for leaders to begin asking the right questions.
This is the chance to be thoughtful about how to regulate the Metaverse. While we don’t believe that we have all the answers for regulating an entirely new entity, we hope this is a starting point for an open conversation between the tech community and policymakers.
We’ve learned a lot from building and working with some of the world’s biggest tech companies disrupting highly regulated industries, and we have a second chance to do things right and create new regulations for a changing digital world.
It’s long, but it’s important. I hope you enjoy it and please feel free to share your thoughts with me online at @BradleyTusk.
By Bradley Tusk, co-founder of Tusk Venture Partners, political strategist, philanthropist and writer.
It’s a term on the tip of everyone’s tongue and yet still a concept that lacks clear definition. It’s an idea that is capturing the brightest minds at the biggest technology companies – Apple, Facebook, Microsoft – and yet no one really knows what it will be.
While questions remain, what we do know is that it’s coming. Arguably, it already exists. We know it will integrate today’s internet with virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and blockchain technology. We know it’s going to be a place where people will interact with each other, where they will buy and sell goods, services, information and access. It’s also a place where communities will form around education, culture, entertainment and faith, and where the traditional boundaries of personal data, property, and privacy will be thrown wide open. We know it’ll resemble, in some ways, the digital world we already know and in others, it will be completely different.
Finally, it will be a place where our current social structures — our governments, our schools, our religious institutions, our social service agencies, our cultural and political organizations — will have to quickly adapt if they want to play a meaningful role.
It’s obvious to us that issues of safety, privacy, taxation, worker classification, and consumer regulation that already preoccupy the tech world today will all be critical to the functioning of the Metaverse. We also know that it will function around and beyond traditional sovereign borders. All of which makes it both really exciting and potentially dangerous.
While policymakers can’t develop specific, detailed regulations for the Metaverse until we have a better sense of what’s actually coming, we can avoid making the same mistakes we did with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and social media generally if we can develop an intellectual framework for regulating the Metaverse now.
As we have seen so often with all types of emerging technology, especially social media platforms, regulators always arrive late to the game. Now is the time for leaders to begin asking the right questions. This is the chance to be thoughtful about how to regulate the Metaverse.
Hard questions like: who runs the Metaverse? Who maintains it? Who’s in charge? How do you regulate a digital entity designed to transcend sovereign borders? How do you ensure safety in a digital, non-sovereign concept? How do you prevent consumer fraud and protect against online predators? Who has the legal power to do this? What are the risks of terrorism in the Metaverse? How would counter-terrorism work? How should privacy rights work? How about taxation? Consumer protection? Do people own their own data? Is it portable? How do you handle worker classification? How do you regulate industries that move largely online, like gaming? How do you avoid another digital divide? Can you move government services onto the Metaverse? If so, which ones? Education? Health care? Voting? The DMV? There are so many questions and at the moment, so few answers.
So let’s get out ahead of it. This is the chance to get it right.
Before diving into the legal framework that underlies the Metaverse, it makes sense to broadly define what a Metaverse is. For this memo, what we call a Metaverse is a 3D, fully immersive, virtual representation of the world that “[represents a broad shift in how we interact with technology](https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-the-metaverse/#:~:text=Broadly speaking%2C the technologies that,the digital and physical worlds.).” Unlike most existing games and simulations, a metaverse is persistent. Like a public street or a neighborhood, it’s there even when you’re not, and things keep happening.
Up to this point, technology has mostly been about building tools and experiences. Now we’ll be building worlds. And though they won’t be completely divorced from the physical world like, say, Animal Crossing, the boundaries between the real and the virtual will be in flux. Each Metaverse will draw these boundaries to suit its particular purposes.