According to Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's antitrust chief, the metaverse, a shared virtual world accessible via the internet, is subject to regulatory scrutiny.
What Happened: Vestager raised concerns about potential dominance by Meta Platforms Inc META in the emerging sector, which has been gaining traction as the successor to the mobile internet.
A EU official pointed out at a conference organized by Keystone Strategy the rise of generative artificial intelligence and language AI models as bright spots in the market, highlighting the need for healthy competition in the metaverse.
Alphabet Inc. GOOGGOOGL-owned Google and Microsoft MSFT are also active in generative artificial intelligence, which is seen as the next bright spot in the industry.
She mentioned the emergence of competing digital realities and language AI models such as ChatGPT, saying Do we need to do more on something new? We have started that work. In the last three years a regulatory scrutiny of digital markets has increased, with a political debate that digital markets need careful attention.
Some antitrust enforcers are more advanced than others in regulating the metaverse, but the legal framework will not be the same across all jurisdictions, according to Vestager.
She believed that this was not necessarily bad, as it allows for the honing of toolkits in the process of mutual learning.
She stated that we are moving at different speeds, and maybe that is not a bad thing.
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