The European Commission on Tuesday set out a plan in a bid to take the lead in the metaverse - shared virtual worlds accessible through the internet - and to prevent Big Tech dominating a nascent sphere that could boost economic growth.
  • HubertManne@kbin.social
    9·
    1 year ago

    Would love if europe pushed open standards. Would love the US to but it believes everything should be run by corpos.

  • Bernie Ecclestoned@sh.itjust.works
    01·
    1 year ago

    So big tech invests billions, and the EU is going to take the lead how exactly?

    The scheme includes bringing together creators, media companies and others to create an industrial ecosystem, setting up regulatory sandboxes to help companies test out the metaverse and rolling out skills development programmes as well virtual public services.

    Meh

    • RandAlThor@lemmy.caOP
      17·
      1 year ago

      They want to carve out a piece of the metaverse for European companies is basically the message. We’ve learned in the past 30 years that large firms dominate different aspects of tech space. Take a look at what they’ve done in aircraft manufacturing - they’ve elbowed into the space that Americans were dominating. Now there’s just 2 - Boeing and Airbus which is theirs. They are going to seek to replicate that, learning from the mistakes in tech in the past.

      • Bernie Ecclestoned@sh.itjust.works
        01·
        1 year ago

        Boeing and Airbus bought up every competitor to create a duopoly, and Boeing’s 737 MAX issues have hurt them recently

        I just don’t see how the EU regulating the metaverse will result in a competitive advantage over the billions that Meta for e.g. have invested in their headsets and software

        • RandAlThor@lemmy.caOP
          07·
          1 year ago

          They bought up the small ones because they were failing. That industry requires huge economies of scale and the smaller ones couldn’t cope. EU created Airbus out of the scrap pieces of dying European aircraft manufacturers and injected capital into it and gave it a captive market. In metaverse they are starting to behave this way - currently Threads isn’t allowed to operate in Europe. They are going to create regulatory barriers around it. Allow European alternatives to grow - i.e. Mastodon, etc. And provide any kind of support - regulatory, capital, incentives, etc. European governments have used their might to create industry giants so that their countries remain relevant and that wealth creation and innovation remains rooted in their countries. It will be the same in this case.