Today, four academics, two of whom specialize in antitrust law, launch the ‘Metaverse Competition Agency’ (MCA). One of them is Thibault Schrepel, who wrote the book “Blockchain + Antitrust”. The organization’s work will begin in Decentraland, but it plans to expand into multiple virtual worlds.

Their goal is to monitor innovation as the metaverse develops and explore competition issues in this entirely new space. “The MCA studies how economic competition arises, evolves, and ends,” the agency says in a white paper.

One of the key draws is as a “clean sheet experiment” where they can “study economic competition without the burden of the past.”

Antitrust enforcement without governments?

In the real world, antitrust agencies are run by top-down governments. But this new agency intends to work in reverse and will explore topics with results driven by community votes. Unsurprisingly, given the founders’ background, the organization is non-profit and academic in focus.

If you don’t have ties to governments, how will you work? When competition concerns are noted, it intends to propose strategies to address them. Although it also aims to cooperate with competition agencies in the real world.

Here’s a question: for a decentralized ecosystem like Decentraland, what real-world antitrust agency might have jurisdiction? Is it none, one or several agencies?

This was the response of the CRM: “All the agencies would have, on paper, jurisdiction since the criterion is that trade be affected in their territory. But in practice, we think they will face what Barlow mentioned in his Declaration of Independence: the absence of bottlenecks will create compliance problems.”

“For this, we want to generate consensus and propose votes to modify rules using decentralized means (as explained in our White Paper). Agencies in the natural world could do it too, but we think their proposals would be systematically rejected. because they are centralized agencies.”

In addition to devising remedial strategies to address competition concerns, the MCA also plans to post a series of case studies on its website.

The dimensions of the competition.

Within the metaverse, competition can function in several dimensions. The most obvious is the competition between ecosystems such as Decentraland, The Sandbox or Roblox, and the new agency will explore both centralized and decentralized virtual worlds. Another aspect is the behavior of organizations within each of the ecosystems.

Interoperable avatar systems are interesting because they could introduce competition issues that cut across the entire metaverse.

The MCA is looking for fellow collaborators with roles that include analysts writing case studies and inspectors looking for anti-competitive practices. The really important question is whether your avatar comes with an inspector badge.

The founding presidents are Nicolas Petit, Thibault Schrepel, David Teece and Bowman Heiden.