In the United Kingdom, new restrictions are in the works focusing on the metaverse and the technology businesses working on a variety of proposed products.
The British government has drafted an ‘Online Safety Bill’ to combat illegal content and safeguard consumers from “harmful material.” According to a recent Financial Times report, metaverse ventures will also be subject to the bill and strict control.
Facebook, which has renamed as Meta in order to further its metaverse plans, is the principal source of concern among politicians and regulators.
Officials involved in drafting the bill have voiced reservations about Meta’s aspirations to establish a virtual world online. “Technology companies can’t use the metaverse to escape regulation,” argued Lorna Woods, an Internet law professor, and William Perrin, a trustee at the Carnegie UK Trust, noting:
“The feeling is that Meta has moved the debate on to a new type of service that avoids regulation. But that isn’t the case at all in our view. The Online Safety regime applies.”
Meta has stated that security and privacy will be a key component of its metaverse designs, claiming that it has already invested £37 million in research. Those statements, however, are a hard sell when the company allows fake news, scams, and illegal content to be spread on its social media platform Facebook.
New privacy and e-commerce laws and regulations, Meta said in its annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week, “may delay or impede the development of our products and services, increase our operating costs, require significant management time and attention, or otherwise harm our business”.
Various tech giants including including Microsoft, Nvidia, Disney, and Apple, have indicated interest in the Metaverse, but Meta appears to be the most serious danger due to Facebook’s poor history of privacy and online safety.
Decentralised blockchain-based metaverses like Axie Infinity, Decentraland, and The Sandbox are more difficult to regulate because they lack a CEO.
Many of today’s new metaverse initiatives are controlled by decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), and regulators will have a difficult time combining internet safety rules with a comprehensive crackdown.
Because these metaverse ecosystems are mostly made up of gaming, social media, and digital banking, they require their own set of guidelines as opposed to a maladroit approach laid out by the policymakers who are generally unaware of the technology involved.