EU has its eyes on competitors, antitrust in the metaverse – Ledger Insights

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has her eye on competition in the metaverse. Speaking at a conference today, she noted that it has previously been too slow to react to events as the economy becomes more digital. She wondered what competition in the metaverse should be like.

“We need to anticipate and plan for change, given the obvious fact that our regulatory and compliance process will always be slower than the markets themselves,” he said. “For example, it’s about time we started asking what healthy competition in the metaverse should look like, or how something like ChatGPT can change the equation.”

He mentioned the Digital Markets Law, which came into force at the end of last year and aims to regulate the gatekeepers of major online platforms.

“Clearly there is something better than breaking up a business, and that is making sure the markets don’t tip in the first place,” Verstager said. “That is why merger control also plays an important role. In recent years, the scrutiny of technology mergers has certainly increased.

Late last year, four academics unveiled the Metaverse Competition Agency. One of the founders wrote the book, “Blockchain + Antitrust”.

Arguably the latest fascination with the metaverse was sparked by a combination of COVID and Facebook’s rebranding to Meta. This explains one of the reasons why the sector is likely to remain on the regulators’ radar.

Meta participates in multiple accelerators, including in Europe with L’Oreal in France and Telefónica in Spain, ensuring that its technology is used by promising startups. You want to control hardware like Apple does with mobile phones. And avoid something similar to Apple’s impact on Meta revenue when it restricted cross-app user tracking.

One of the keys to ensuring competition is interoperability, something Mark Zuckerberg mentioned frequently in his 2021 rebranding announcement. But to make the metaverse interoperable avatar and identity separate will require them to be portable. That is the goal of one of the startups he is working with, Gamium.

With this convenience of portable avatars, there is a risk of data proliferating on the Internet, even more so than data leaked through browser cookies.