Facebook’s long and bumpy road to the metaverse

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Mark Zuckerberg painted an expansive vision of the metaverse on Thursday, but the “Internet incarnate” he envisions is still years away, while concerns about the company’s present are both real and urgent.

Why it matters: Zuckerberg insists his company can both eliminate its current problems and build its future vision. Critics, meanwhile, argue that Facebook is trying to move on without taking responsibility for the problems it has already created.

Driving news:

Zuckerberg’s keynote speech at a virtual developer event Thursday largely focused on a distant view in which there is a single virtual world, known as a metaverse, that can be accessed across a number of devices, many of which are not. they are not even technologically feasible yet. This embodied internet would allow people to live and work in virtual space using a mix of realistic and fantastic avatars, wearing all kinds of virtual clothes and accessories. While outlining the vision, Zuckerberg snapped a series of snaps at Apple, portraying the iPhone maker and Google as the real threats to competition and the metaverse as the most open and competitive successor to the internet today. And then there was the rebrand, with Zuckerberg announcing that the company will henceforth be known as Meta, a move that, he insists, has nothing to do with current controversy.

The big picture: Facebook is embarking on a broad and ambitious future, but it’s important to remember how many new and thorny questions we will face in a digital universe that brings physically distant people together.

These include: What types of speeches and actions are permitted and who controls a world that extends beyond today’s legal jurisdictions. It is also worth mentioning that the company has talked about how many problems with its social network have caught the company in the dark.

Between the lines: There are other challenges beyond security and privacy along the path to the metaverse, especially if there really has to be a single metaverse for everyone, rather than tons of different and incompatible digital universes.

Facebook says it wants to make sure that happens, working with the rest of the tech industry to ensure digital assets work in the virtual fiefdoms of multiple companies.

Technically, this isn’t impossible, especially considering how much 3D content is being created using one of the two popular game engines today, such as Unity and Unreal Engine. But getting Google, Apple, Microsoft and others to agree on the commercial terms governing such a shared metaverse could be a difficult proposition. And while Zuckerberg invited other companies to join him in his vision, he also criticized the business models that many have employed with the mobile Internet, asking himself some tough questions about how this virtual world will be funded and ultimately monetized.

Our Thought Bubble: Facebook (and society more broadly) has the opportunity to use the time it takes to build a metaverse to investigate all the ways the vision could go wrong, as well as to set norms and expectations.

That’s the plan, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth insists. He notes that Facebook understands that no one has clear answers to big questions yet, like when conversations in the metaverse should be monitored and when they should be private, or where to strike the balance between privacy and security. “I’m looking forward to having those conversations,” Bosworth told me Thursday. “I don’t think we should make those decisions, certainly not alone.”

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