The European Union is getting increasingly proactive about the metaverse — planning a full policy initiative this year on the topic and launching a slew of commissions along with a “citizens assembly” to establish its priorities for (eventually) regulating the nascent field. But it’s a really nascent field. The extensively networked, fully-3D version of online life imagined by the metaverse’s loudest boosters isn’t even close to being built yet. It’s universally agreed that the closest real-life equivalents are kid-focused virtual worlds like Minecraft and Roblox. That means the EU’s efforts invite a unique, thorny question in the world of tech policy: How do you regulate something that doesn’t actually exist? “We’re talking about something that’s not really prevailing yet,” Patrick Grady, a policy analyst at the Center For Data Innovation told me. “There’s going to be a lot of pushback from industry, about how early this initiative is… a lot of these policy issues are yet to emerge.” It could be years before anything like a “Metaverse Act” is put on the table, Grady told me, despite the flurry of action. So what, exactly, is Europe looking into? During our conversation Grady pointed to major concerns around consumer protection, specifically data privacy and safety, as well as preserving competition; a report published by the European Parliamentary Research Service last year explains those issues as well as some around legal liability, health risks and accessibility. So while the “metaverse” itself might not be here — and our smartphones certainly haven’t yet been replaced by VR headsets (or even sleek AR goggles) — there are plenty of unresolved issues with our current digital lives that forward-thinking regulators are trying to get ahead of in the three-dimensional world. I spoke about that with Eva Maydell, a member of the European Parliament who’s spent her career working closely on tech policy, including the EU’s currently-being-negotiated AI Act. Maydell, a member of Bulgaria’s center-right GERB party, made a decidedly “crawl before you walk” case for progress on metaverse policy despite the slew of action this year, saying the EU’s existing suite of tech regulation provides plenty of regulatory firepower. “New breakthroughs like the development of the metaverse present new challenges, but at the same time they amplify existing ones,” Maydell told me. “We need to be careful not to legislate too early… we currently have laws, like the General Data Protection Regulation, and other laws in the digital sphere that we are working on, which will indirectly also apply to the metaverse.” There’s also the major elephant in the room when it comes to any European tech policy: Namely, that the U.S. isn’t invited into the conversation. “I'm hearing from the Commission’s initiative that they only want to invite and consult with European companies, which will not be [producing] the products that European consumers will be using, which I see as a challenge,” Grady said. Kavya Pearlman is the CEO of the nonprofit XR Safety Initiative (XRSI), a San Francisco-based group that advocates for consumer protections and privacy in VR around the world. She told me about her own efforts to bridge that gap on policy, with the group’s shared priorities with EU regulators in mind — and about how stateside Big Tech keeping its cards close to its chest might be playing its own role in creating that gap. “We recently did a partnership with [Brussels-based think tank] Friends of Europe, and our mission was to bridge the gap between the Valley and Brussels,” Pearlman said. “There's a gap in the overall perception of the metaverse… because there are some key players that have not yet even spoken [about the metaverse], like Apple.” One useful comparison for any hypothetical, major legislative effort around a fast-moving, mostly U.S.-driven technology — the EU’s AI Act, which is getting close to a final draft. Maydell compared metaverse regulation to the sometimes futile-seeming efforts of regulators to keep up with AI’s dizzying pace, by way of arguing that the best tools for managing virtual worlds might already be in front of us in the real one. “A number of people were calling for a hardcore law around AI a few years ago, and I am personally glad that we took some time before we started working on the law itself… four years ago, AI was developing at a very different speed compared to today,” Maydell said. “That could happen with the metaverse, as well.”
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