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Presented by CTIA – The Wireless Association: How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures | | | | |  | | By Derek Robertson | Presented by CTIA – The Wireless Association | With help from Konstantin Kakaes Welcome to a new newsletter from POLITICO, where we’re tracking the digital world now being born, and the collision unfolding between its rule-breaking ethos and the rulemakers in Washington, Brussels and elsewhere. We’re covering crypto, the metaverse, AI and other disruptive technologies as they hit the world’s centers of power. | 
The much-ballyhooed metaverse even got an entire city at this year's CES in Las Vegas — though this metropolis was just a tent. | John Hendel / POLITICO | It’s almost impossible to talk about the digital future in 2022 without talking about the metaverse. Put Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg aside for a second, if you can. What is the metaverse, really? An awkward live chat room, populated by Weeble-shaped 3D avatars? A sci-fi wish-fulfillment fantasy (or dystopia)? The game your kid got addicted to during the pandemic? The short answer is that it's all of the above, and barely anything yet. Metaverse boosters expect it to be the next phase of how we interact with the internet: a broadly shared 3D world, or network of 3D worlds, in which people conduct large parts of their social and professional lives. The idea of an alternative virtual landscape has existed since almost the dawn of the computer itself, but only now has technology caught up enough to make it even remotely plausible. Right now, it exists primarily in games — millions of kids spend their time inside the worlds of Roblox, or Minecraft — but there’s already a modest and fast-growing virtual adult economy. There’s a metaverse real-estate investment fund. Metaverse concert venues . A metaverse Fashion Week. The implications of a new, broadly shared 3D space are vast. So are the concerns. Experts and enthusiasts are already tackling questions about the meaning of property rights, governance, and personal safety in those spaces. So who’s actually setting the rules for this place? How will it even be built? That’s one of our goals with this newsletter: to figure out who’s minding the store. Capitol Hill already has one group of lawmakers paying attention: a small band of legislators dubbing themselves the “Reality Caucus” (formally the Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Technologies). It’s composed of a bipartisan handful of legislators from tech-friendly districts, like Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who represents Redmond, where Microsoft is headquartered, and even Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a former electronics entrepreneur who has loudly decried purported anti-conservative bias in “Big Tech” but has focused on more wonky issues behind the scenes, also joining the Smart Cities and “IT Modernization” caucuses. So what is the caucus really up to? We called Cecily Hahn, senior legislative counsel to DelBene. “The purpose of the caucus has always been to highlight the way that XR [“extended reality”] technology can be used in a variety of different industries and services,” she said. “People tend to think of [this technology] as just for gaming; I view the purpose of the caucus as to help educate members and staff about all its different applications.” The caucus, then, is largely concerned with boosting hometown industries, a tried-and-true legislative tradition. When it comes to regulatory oversight, however, there’s a case that industry might have already left Washington in the dust. “It’s already too late,” said Tom Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former chairman of the FCC under former President Barack Obama who has written extensively on the need for more oversight in the tech world. “We’re playing catch-up ball now… we're not talking about being like the FDA, and saying, ‘Before you can put a product out you’ve got to have it approved.’” If he’s right, then the rules of the road of the metaverse are being established right now in the private sector. The players to watch will be: - Private companies like Meta, née Facebook, with its titanic rebrand and investment in the virtual space
- Crypto enthusiasts hoping to fuse the blockchain to the virtual world’s backbone
- The big entertainment companies jockeying for the IP to create the most appealing virtual oasis
- And the small but passionate technologists who hope its total immersion will create a more open and interconnected online world.
For now, Washington’s engagement with all this is extremely nascent and granular. (We’ll look more closely at Europe in tomorrow’s newsletter.) The Democrats in the Reality Caucus submitted an amendment to the America COMPETES Act that added “immersive technologies” to its list of technology focus areas; the office of caucus member Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) told Digital Future Daily this week that the representative is “looking at appropriate vehicles” to re-introduce her 2019 VR TECHS Act, which would form a committee at the General Services Administration to investigate the use of VR technology in the federal government. Immersive reality tech and its real-world implications might not be on the political front burner right now. But they might arrive sooner than you expect, and they almost certainly will be for your children — the number of people playing immersive reality games like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite today is greater than the total number of active internet users in the late 1990s. | | | | A message from CTIA – The Wireless Association: 5G Home Broadband is bringing competition to cable and fast, reliable, affordable home internet service to millions of Americans. With this new, easy-to-use, home broadband solution the entire household can stream, video conference, learn, game and more with great speeds and performance. More than 30 million America homes are covered today, with millions more expected in the years to come. Learn more about fast, affordable 5G Home Broadband. www.ctia.org/5gbroadband | | | | | | | 
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces the company's new name, Meta, during a virtual event in October 2021. | (Eric Risberg/AP Photo) |
Earlier this year Bloomberg reported on Meta’s big D.C. public-relations push, which one tech analyst called the company’s effort to “separate the metaverse” from its otherwise bad political vibes. One participant in not-Facebook’s informational calls to think tanks on the Hill was Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. Below are a few excerpts, condensed and edited for clarity, from my conversation with him about the policy implications of virtual reality crashing in on our real one. — Derek Robertson
What are the most interesting policy implications of the metaverse? It's an unknown unknown, to an extent. And particularly as it moves from being a hobbyist medium to something with more of a mass audience, whatever form that takes, then that will bring a host of new challenges. I think the children's [safety] issue will be big, because it does sit in a kind of liminal space between social media and gaming. What do you sense are Meta’s main priorities when it comes to governance in the metaverse? The biggest concern right now is sexual harassment and interpersonal harassment, people getting in each other's faces. They’ve implemented a mandatory buffer to begin with; they’ve since allowed people to individually scale that back, but I think that’s the main challenge. Going forward I think they will, and should, keep an eye out for VR-specific harms. Buzzfeed recently did a report in which they made a “Trump World” and wrote that the election was stolen, and about QAnon, in floating type. I don't think that should be a moderation priority. If you can get the same kind of content in the same way on a GeoCities site, then neither the value or the danger of VR is there. If people build a simulation of the U.S. Capitol, and are running practice raids to kidnap a congressman or something, that's an entirely different story. Who are you paying attention to when it comes to shaping policy in this space? I tend to just at this point focus on products; the ecosystem doesn't feel as mature as it does elsewhere. I'm much more likely to be on, especially before it launched, Facebook Horizon’s beta forums, just looking at people's feedback and thoughts and reactions. It's always a question of what will be the first politically salient incident to involve a new technology. There was all kinds of concern about deepfakes in the early days, but the geopolitical impact seems to be pretty much nil, because it’s all context-based. Right now it’s a hobbyist community, like the early internet. And beyond just being new, the fact that it’s self-selected in a certain way matters a lot. These are people who went out and bought this currently fairly pricey headset, and so it's not just like spinning up a Facebook account, you aren't doing it because your kid is on it. There’s more tolerance for quirks, gimmicks, being trolled, or whatever, among early adopters than when something is normal, and your aunt is on it. Your aunt doesn’t understand what being trolled is. | | | | A message from CTIA – The Wireless Association:   | | | | | And You Thought The Oculus Was Awkward | | Constructing a convincing virtual reality requires that one seamlessly integrate lots of constituent technologies: good displays, fast processors, lightweight and accurate sensors. Then you have to somehow convey it to a human brain. The work of figuring out how to integrate these things goes back farther than many might realize. Ivan Sutherland, then at Harvard University, led a team that built what was arguably the first modern VR system back in 1968 with funding from the agency that was to become DARPA and from AT&T. Sutherland didn’t have access to the tiny accelerometers and gyroscopes used in today’s VR headsets, so he used two different methods for sensing head position: a giant mechanical arm hanging from the ceiling, and an ultrasonic sensor. | 
Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library |
He had to build special hardware to quickly transform the images shown to the user in each eye to correspond to head movements — no general purpose computer at the time was fast enough. The virtual “world” that users could inhabit comprised a single room, with wire-frame letters showing North, South, East and West., and a ceiling and floor, marked “C” and “F” respectively.
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Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library |
“Even with this relatively crude system, the three dimensional illusion was real,” Sutherland wrote in a 1968 paper describing his team's accomplishments. This might be the first room to have existed in the metaverse.
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Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger (bschreckinger@politico.com); Derek Robertson (drobertson@politico.com); Konstantin Kakaes (kkakaes@politico.com); and Heidi Vogt (hvogt@politico.com).
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