https://www.wired.co.uk/article/metaverse-big-tech-land-grab-hype
The Metaverse is a fuzzy concept: It entered dictionaries via Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash, where the Metaverse is the virtual refuge from an anarchy-laden world controlled by the Mafia, and was brought back by a series of blogposts by VC Matthew Ball.
The morality of the Metaverse project is the least of its problems. Unlike Google Glass, the gold standard of tech blunders, it is not an overhyped (and ill-conceived) product: It is pure hype, without a product—except for some hypothetical “building blocks.”
A letter by the CEO of Japanese game developer Square Enix, in which the executive expounded on his interest in NFTs and drew an odd distinction between people who “play for fun” and those who “play to contribute” was also badly received.
The Smoking Gun in the Facebook Antitrust Case
The government wants to break up the world’s biggest social network. Internal company emails show why.
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ftc-antitrust-case-smoking-gun/
At first blush, privacy and antitrust might seem like separate issues—two different chapters in a textbook about big tech. But the decline in Facebook’s privacy protections plays a central role in the states’ case. Antitrust is a complicated field built on a simple premise: When a company doesn’t face real competition, it will be free to do bad things.
a conceptual breakthrough on that front. In a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” the legal scholar Dina Srinivasan argued that Facebook’s takeover of the social networking market has inflicted a very specific harm on consumers: It has forced them to accept ever worse privacy settings. Facebook, Srinivasan pointed out, began its existence in 2004 by differentiating itself on privacy. Unlike then-dominant MySpace, for example, where profiles were visible to anyone by default, Facebook profiles could be seen only by your friends or people at the same school
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Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/facebook-hit-with-antitrust-probe-for-tying-oculus-use-to-facebook-accounts
In recent years Facebook has been pushing to add a ‘social layer’ to the VR platform — but the heavy-handed requirement for Oculus users to have a Facebook account has not proved popular with gamers.
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
Chris Hughes
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/05/09/break-up-facebook/