The watchdog warned of the likely dominance of the big players in the metaverse market: they could dominate and limit user choice by driving up content prices.
Friedrich Wenzel Bulst and Sophie De Vinck, from the media department of the EU Competition Authority, believe that any large company that forms a closed ecosystem, such as Meta, can negatively influence the industry:
“The giant is able to restrict its consumers, business partners and competitors in a variety of ways, forcing them to buy their own brand products, charging exorbitant fees or misusing people’s personal information.”
To keep the metaverse innovative and open, regulators need to be involved in its development, antitrust officials say.
“There are good reasons for law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic to actively accompany the technological and market evolution in this area,” Bulst and De Wink said.
Experts note that the ways that exist to avoid the monopolization of virtual reality through the joint work of various industry players on common standards and technologies, in themselves create risks for competition.
EU officials’ concerns extend beyond competition to areas such as data privacy, intellectual property and freedom of speech in the metaverse, De Wink and Bulst emphasized.
Last year, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken suggested that in the future, many platforms will be separate metaverses. Therefore, no company will have a monopoly on Metaverse.
Source: Bits
I am an experienced journalist, writer, and editor with a passion for finance and business news. I have been working in the journalism field for over 6 years, covering a variety of topics from finance to technology. As an author at World Stock Market, I specialize in finance business-related topics.
