In 2021 we saw how Mark, owner of Facebook, changed the name of the company so that the social network is not confused with the company that owns many other projects. Meta is Instagram, it is Whatsapp, it is Facebook, it is Oculus… it is a lot, and among that “a lot” was included a metaverse, a virtual reality where innovative experiences could be lived.
Lots of money, lots of engineers, and a short while later, Nick Clegg, president of Meta Global Affairs, says it’s not exactly true, that Meta doesn’t want to build its own metaverse.
He comments on it in detail in a huge article in medium, a reading of 8,000 words that can be summed up as: «we do not want to build a virtual world where everyone will enter with their projects, we want to help have an open metaverse where there is no one responsible for the foundations ».
Clegg regrets the fractured Internet that the world is seeing today, he regrets that there is android and iOS, Windows and Mac… he regrets that there is no more compatibility between what exists, and that developers have to work on different fronts to reach everyone . That’s why he wants the metaverse to be a more open and interoperable space, built not by one or two tech giants, but by a combination of public and private initiatives.
It is a change of course, since Clegg has also asked the regulators to invest soon in determining the rules of these spaces, he does not want Meta to define something like that, becoming the monopolist of the metaverse of the future.
The fact is that many millions of dollars have already been spent in the metaverse in a quarter of 2021, so it is surprising that there is a change at this time. Surely they have realized that it takes much more than beautiful VR apps to conquer the world, not even Meta manages to do all the work on a check basis.
