The Metaverse Wonks Unite

The metaverse is one of the most stubbornly “emerging” of all the emergent policy issues we cover here at DFD, with even its biggest proponents emphasizing that the arrival of a truly shared, immersive online world might still be five, 10 or even 15 years away.

But there are a lot of resources being invested in it already, from hardware and computing power to social forethought. And there are already a lot of people trying to hammer out the rules of the road.

At the third annual AR/VR Policy Conference in downtown Washington today, a slew of them descended on a 14th Street conference space to talk about what work, education, privacy, and even democracy itself might look like in a 3D digital world.

One of them was Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who popped in briefly before a vote to deliver keynote remarks, and in what might possibly be the wonkiest applause line of 2023, announce a timeframe for a Government Accountability Office report on immersive tech that he and a bipartisan group of senators requested last year.

“The GAO accepted our request to conduct that study, and we should see the final version released in mid-2024,” Young said. “That is my ‘drop the mic’ moment.”

Getting fired up about a forthcoming GAO report is pretty emblematic of the very early stage the government is in with regard to virtual reality tech. That means the hosts of this event, the XR Association (XR is an industry term for “extended reality”) and the Information Technology Innovation Forum, a leading tech industry-friendly nonprofit and think tank, are interested in bipartisan conversations meant to keep the U.S. on the cutting edge of the technology’s development and deployment.

Some politicians are on board as well: Young led a successful effort, trumpeted by the XRA, to include “immersive technology” as a key research area funded by the CHIPS and Science Act.

A few takeaways from the conference:

• The metaverse could become a geopolitical issue. In an early panel on “Global Competition, Free Trade, and Democratic Values in the Metaverse,” Jennifer Bachus, an assistant secretary for the Department of State’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, talked about the need for the U.S. to develop a comprehensive vision for how it will develop the metaverse, similar to China’s or Europe’s. “The first thing the United States needs to do in response to that is to come up with a vision for the role of XR in society,” Bachus said. “I believe very strongly that just like AI, XR can be a public good.”
  
• Regulators are already sniffing around. Ahead of the conference I spoke with Rob Sherman, a VP at Meta and the company’s deputy chief privacy officer for policy, about what their conversations with government and civil society groups have been like so far. He described how the questions they’re working to tackle have gradually become more concrete as metaverse tech moves closer to reality. They “want to understand how the products are working, how we are communicating with people about different aspects of the experience,” Sherman told me. “Safety comes up a lot, as well as talking about in a virtual world what are the right ways to make sure that people have autonomy, and are able to maintain separation from other people, or control their experience.”
  
• Non-metaverse digital worries still apply, but might have different solutions. The most immediate policy concern for most metaverse thinkers, wonks and metaverse-curious legislators are privacy and child safety — the same topics of concern as the traditional internet. The conference organizers invited me to moderate a panel on “Assessing the Impact of Recent Privacy Legislation on the Metaverse,” during which panelists from Microsoft, the Future of Privacy Forum, and the Cato Institute chatted about how existing privacy regulation from the social media era might — or might not — fit an era where smart eyeglasses with embedded cameras track everything from faces on the street to your own moving retinas.

On that last point, the privacy concerns are very obvious, but the fixes less so. Jennifer Huddleston, of the libertarian Cato Institute, argued that the intimate forms of data collected in the metaverse are necessary for it to function in the first place, contradicting privacy activists who say it must be curbed by the state.

“Privacy doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it actually clashes with many parts of how we engage with this technology,” she said, warning that our existing frameworks for data privacy might become hopelessly outdated.

In my conversation with Sherman — who also appeared at the conference, in a late-afternoon chat with XR Association President and CEO Liz Hyman — he said that Meta, the private-sector heavyweight at the center of this discussion, wants to bake an understanding of privacy and data sharing into the hardware itself.

“Using data to improve our ability to provide services is really important,” Sherman said. “Data is an important piece of building technology that enables people to do new things, but we have a lot of responsibility for how we think about it and how we implement these technologies.”