 Hello and welcome to our press briefing on how to build a metaverse for all. I'm Kirsten Salyer from the World Economic Forum and I'm joined here today by a stellar panel of speakers. We have Kathy Lee, head of Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Sport at the World Economic Forum. Huda Alhashimi, Deputy Minister of Cabinet Affairs for Strategic Affairs, the Office of the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. And Yatsuya, co-founder and executive chairman at Anamoka Brands. Thank you all for being here with us today. So the metaverse has been a big buzzword here in Davos this week. And we're here today to speak about what exactly it means and how we can ensure that it is inclusive. So why does this matter? The metaverse is actually on track, according to some estimates, to be an $800 billion market by 2024. So we're just looking one year ahead. And that will have serious implications for business as well as for consumers who are looking to navigate what this means for their work and for their lives. It also raises some serious questions about how we ensure these technologies are accessible, inclusive and safe. So that's the focus of the World Economic Forum's defining and building the metaverse initiative. This is an initiative that is made up of more than 150 members who are working on answering these tough questions. And there's two new papers released today, one on interoperability in the metaverse and another on demystifying that consumer metaverse experience. So Kathy, could you tell us a bit about why this research is so important and what these initial findings mean for the metaverse? Thanks, Kirsten, for that. Hello, everyone. Kathy Lee, Head of Media, Entertainment and Sport Platform at the Forum. So the metaverse has been a buzzword, is a evolving concept, one that doesn't have a standard definition yet, but many would agree that this new age of the internet will likely to disrupt but also transform the current social and also economic structures for more immersive and pathetic social experiences to more universal access to education and healthcare. The metaverse does bring us a lot of the new opportunities but at the same time, tremendous challenges as well. So because of all of this interest from business and also public, the forum felt the time was right to start this initiative and really bring together the key stakeholders, public sector, private sector, civil society, academia to come together and contribute to developing a future metaverse that is safe, inclusive, interoperable, equitable, but also economically viable. And that's why we launched the defining and building the metaverse initiative at our last annual meeting in May. As the leading international organization for public-private partnerships, the forum is uniquely positioned to bring together this diverse set of stakeholders. The work focused on two key areas. One is metaverse governance and the other one is economic and societal value creation of the two tracks. The governance track focuses on defining a set of governance frameworks that's recommended frameworks that prevent potential harms and also mitigate emerging risks while ensuring equity and interoperability. The value creation track focuses on providing systems guidance to prepare for the organizations to prepare for the inevitability of disruption and also be aware of the potential value that the metaverse can generate. Since the launch, the initiative has convened more than 150 partners and organizations, including my two co-panelists here who are on the CERN committee of the initiative together with the two working groups exploring the seams across both tracks. On governance, the main seams that's being explored are privacy, security, interoperability, safety, and identity. The value creation track started with exploration of the consumer-facing metaverse and will develop to cover industrial and enterprise metaverse over the time. And in the meantime, we will also research the opportunities and trade-offs in access, inclusion, sustainability, and well-being for those who seek to use the metaverse. Through months of intense research, countless of working group meeting and CERN committee meetings and the interviews with constituents from all sectors, both sectors are now ready to release their first outputs. The first output of the value creation track is an insight report demystifying the consumer metaverse and explores key components, foundational technologies, rows and paths to economic value and growth in the singular consumer metaverse. The governance track is launching interoperability, a briefing paper called interoperability in the metaverse. For the metaverse to operate seamlessly, it will need to require a certain degree of interoperability for users to move, transact, participate across different platforms and localities. The two tracks collaborate closely with each other to make sure that the value creation in the metaverse is considered within a well-established governance framework, while the governance recommendations remain cognizant of the economic and also social opportunities. And lastly, I just wanted to mention that although, again, metaverse presents such significant challenges, it could also be used for immense good. And especially when driven by purposeful and ethical public-private partnerships. Thank you, Kathy. I think that oftentimes interplay between the opportunities and the challenges is really interesting. And I'm hoping, Huda, you can elaborate a bit on that in terms of actually looking at exciting developments in regulation to address some of these challenges. What are these exciting developments in the regulatory sphere that will be unique to the metaverse? And what do you think the most pressing issues are? So first of all, super proud to be part of this steering committee. It's been a wonderful journey, a journey that we're constantly debating and learning from each other. And I think the mix of government and private sector and providers and creators is really bringing this collaborative spirit of something that I guess we all acknowledge is an unknown and it's constantly evolving. In the UAE context, to ask why we are part of this, really we're actively exploring the potential of the metaverse, both from a regulatory aspect but also from a value aspect as well. And that's why the two papers really sort of bring to fruit that there is tremendous economic and societal value on this but if it is unregulated then there might be some issues with privacy, safety and security as well. So it goes very hand in hand. We've recently announced our metaverse strategy. We've also recently announced our blockchain strategy and we've hosted an assembly. So we're quite active in this domain. So there's a lot of exciting things that are happening in the regulatory front and you might understand regulation and excitement don't go hand in hand but I think in our world it does. We see that there might be an exponential increase in innovation and new business models as well as connecting across borders when it comes to the metaverse, especially when it comes to virtual boundaries. We'll be talking about things like cross-border exchanges. So these are things that are quite exciting for expanding markets as well. We want to stop focusing on reproducing physical spaces in the metaverse. I mean, what's the value of having a government office in the metaverse and ask yourself that you want to climb the stairs to that office in the metaverse. We have to ask ourselves why are we still stuck in that domain. So we want to break through and we believe that the exciting things that break through will happen. We also see that regulators will be acting more like referees rather than gatekeepers and that code of conduct will actually take precedence over formulating policies. So these are areas that we believe are exciting and if I could just maybe summarize it into four main aspects and I think you mentioned that ethical and responsible participation that's at the core of what we're trying to do. Size neutral but also tech agnostic. The second one we believe is fostering passporting and this is when we talk about global interoperability and the amount of scalability will happen when we actually do support regulations and standards in that sphere. The third one is on democratizing adoption and this is about ease of access, acceptance, affordability, safety at its core and this is something that we want to be quite sure in the technology is actually really expanding and we see that they're really exploring and unless that happens, it will be just for a few and that's not what we're looking for. We do want it to be equitable and I think the fourth one is supporting innovation regulatory sandboxes and we want to move away from just talking about generic frameworks and talking and beyond declarations. We want to actually test these in real life and the only way we can do that is through having safe regulatory bodies, sandboxing and we're all familiar with that terminology but what does that mean in the metaverse and that's I think is going to be exciting time for us going forward. Thank you, Hilda. I think regulators like referees is a kind of a nice framework to keep in mind as we think through kind of what these challenges might be in a constantly evolving playing field to extend your metaphor. Yet, as we were talking about scale here, how do we go from where we are today to where we're going to be in one year and five years times? This is where interoperability I think becomes increasingly important as Kathy, as you mentioned. How does this exactly help with that value creation and what does ownership look like in this digital world of the metaverse? So thank you, it's a great honor to be here. I think the important question we have to ask ourselves is the time that we spend online right now, we create data and that data creates value for but for who is the question and it creates value for the platforms and the challenge is that actually when you talk about data portability what data are you basically porting from one to another? It's permissioned for the time being and that means value creation in the current format can actually really truly exist to accruing to the end user because they don't own that data or the derivative of the data because after all we can ask ourselves a question if we weren't driving Tesla cars would Tesla actually have the ability to become a self-driving car? The value actually came from the people who are driving it and that is true for name your platform basically data paradigm. So the challenge that we're still debating and discussing is around this interoperability. Interoperability only means something we think if you have ownership but what does ownership of your data look like? It's not just your photos it has to be the derivative of that data but the value of that data generated, right? And so when you then are able to move it imagine just from paradigm of let's say games which is another way where 3.4 billion people are playing games today all of those digital items that they have inside those games $200 billion of value generated last year alone. Actually none of the players own any of those assets they don't own that but where this business will grow is when there's interoperability if you actually own it you would have then the freedom to take your assets from one game to another or maybe create new gaming experiences for those who want to create a new game based on someone else's ownership as we do in the physical world. But that means we have to sort of wrestle around this topic of true digital ownership and maybe digital property rights is one area is the answer web three to use blockchain as a way to validate basically this ownership is it regulation? These are all things obviously that we're trying to come to terms with but I think at a foundation if you don't have true digital property rights then you can't actually have digital freedom the freedom to transact because it's always permissioned so I think that lies at the foundation of making interoperability benefit everyone. Thank you. Something that seems like it's coming across and a lot of the comments here today is really the individual at the heart of the center of how we're thinking about defining what is a very technical and a very digital virtual space. Putting people at the heart of design Kathy that's something that the initiative is sort of working towards developing. Could you speak a little bit more about what that means and especially around issues of accessibility. How are people actually going to be using that space and how do we make sure that that really is an inclusive environment as much as it can be? Yeah, absolutely that's a great question. So when we think about first of all when we think about the metaverse we don't think about the metaverse necessarily as an end state it's just ongoing digital transformation and what that means is everything we're doing now needs to be translated properly into the future of the internet and we've been saying for years that human rights should be respected and translated into the digital context. That means that the rights that you enjoy offline and the rights to privacy to security that you have offline should be translated into online world as well and that's why we keep preaching that the future of the internet therefore the metaverse needs to be human first because human needs to remain at the center of the design and that comes with many different realms. For example, privacy, security and safety when we think about a lot of the issues related to the design of the internet and many of the pitfalls who actually didn't foresee when the internet was born 40 years ago we now need to carefully think about how can we safeguard the future of the internet. Accessibility is one thing that's extremely important. We're talking about accessibility not only in terms of disability but we're also here we're talking about people who have different eyes sides different preferences they may we need to think about when it comes to design of the headsets we need to consider all of those requirements and also demographic and also geographic divide as well. We need to make sure that this doesn't create another opportunity another chance for the further digital divide to occur so all of those needs to be solved through and that's why for example even the interoperability paper focuses on looking at interoperability not only from the technical perspective but usage across different demographic and geographic and also jurisdictional interoperability. Thank you, I think at that point about the metaverse as this evolving next step of the internet is really interesting especially if we look at some of the challenges that have been experienced in the internet thus far one of which of course privacy. Yeah I'm hoping to your experience if you could speak a bit to how you see those continuing debates around privacy online how you see that happening when we're start talking about this virtual world of the metaverse. So I think the way we think of privacy and I think first of all privacy digital identity security they all go hand in hand we already see that happening right now if someone basically intrudes on sort of your personal digital space they steal your identity it's actually much more we have digital reputation today as well it's you know it's not just sort of our sort of physical identity it's our virtual persona our virtual image that is actually important and so in terms of privacy how can you basically do the things online particularly if you look at something doing on chain everything then becomes transparent you see what you're doing is that something we want there's some things in our life that we want to keep private to ourselves the data that we give for instance we want to be able to get the benefits of that but then how much of that should be disclosed to others do we have the right to basically maintain that data do we have the right actually not to share it can we not share it right that's the other question because actually I think we all can assume that the platforms probably know a whole lot about us that we don't actually believe they might understand or maybe they may even know more things more about us how are we able to sort of analyze that I think the answer to us again goes back to the question of actually if we have a form of digital property if we have proper digital property rights then there is a form of a legal system I think the protection on digital privacy isn't going to just be a technical solution it's going to have to be one that is covered in law because we are humans, we are people we live physically as much as we love to exist virtually for many of us I guess and we spend most of our time online we still need to follow the places the physical laws that we're in the physical countries we live in so I think the interplay and the combination with regulation and with government is going to be very important with that absolutely and part of this also is a constantly evolving nature of innovation within that space Huda as you mentioned in terms of looking at innovation sandboxes you know how can we think through what's next in the metaverse I was hoping you could speak a bit to some of these developments these innovations and where you see some potential for the metaverse to be that force for good as Cathy mentioned I think definitely there's a lot of exciting things happening in this fear and we talk about force for good we talk about human-centered metaverse and we really as a steering group we've been addressing that as well and we've really put it at the core public value and interoperability as Cathy mentioned it doesn't look at just technology and in fact when we were debating this it's really value to precedence in all the different aspects that we looked at with exciting things there's a lot of exciting things that I would say is trying to mitigate potential risks so if we put it that way one of the areas that we're finding quite interesting is on mental well-being and with the amount of time that we'll be spending in the metaverse the hybrid between physical and virtual it will take its toll on mental well-being and we're seeing a lot of countries that are really actively pursuing embracing neuro-technology and brain health into their regulation quite early on so this is something that's exciting it's very early days but it's something that we should learn from each other and that's the beauty of all of us exploring in this fear the other aspect that we're looking at is new forms of harassment and security and safety and the reason why there are new forms and it's actually happening in web 2.0 it doesn't mean it's something that we have to anticipate for metaverse is because technology is constantly evolving so the forms of harassment are changing and the core of what we're trying to do here is the only way we can tackle this is by being agile and agility is at the core of all of this and because we cannot see what's coming next we see the chat AI that's recently taken over all of the university's debate right now so it's either we anticipate the future which at this industry is not as easy to do or we program ourselves to be agile to be able to evolve with the technology that's evolving around us another key thing is being proactive for risks and hence sandboxing those potential areas I think one of the things that we as regulators always dabble with is the timeliness of regulation how fast or how late and the report does talk a lot about that as well is that how soon should we be involved or how much space should we give for the industry to grow and then jump in and really there is no right answer to that and it really depends on the severity of the impact it will have on society and at the same time the severity of impacts will have on growth and technology as well Thank you, that's a really interesting point you brought up around mental wellbeing harassment, risks that could potentially come up in this space as it has in the evolution of the internet to date Kathy I'm hoping you can bridge this with some of the other work we're doing around digital safety and digital safety especially in the metaverse what have you found to be most effective at addressing these concerns? Absolutely, so back to the earlier point about we need to first of all recognize that there's digital rights there's human rights needs to be properly placed into this context and that's the first step because if we talk about the safety in the VEP 2.0 in terms of the nature of it it's not that different from VEP 3.0 or the future of the internet it's just the magnitude of the kind of content you probably need to moderate is going to be at a different level because we're not talking about only text-based or image-based harmful content potentially there could be because we're talking about audio and gestures so a lot of the ephemeral communications will need to be taken into consideration and that will need innovative technologies to detect some of the harmful content or inappropriate conduct when they happen there needs to be proper ways of intervention and appropriate risk assessment framework in place to make sure that we do design the spaces safety by design so those are all the very important things to be taken into consideration and again, without a public-private kind of collaboration to look at these challenges altogether I don't think we can get there. Thank you very much I'd like to now open it up to the audience if we have any questions I'm happy to... All right, thank you. My question was about the property rights and the value chain do you think the cats already have the bag and sounds like Facebook already knows everything about me? How could I get... There would have to be some... Yeah, a lot of the chat GPT, I don't know but they already know about me and I didn't even know it existed so like how do we get those rights back when they're already seemingly been passed away? Well, that's a great question I think when a lot of people look at, for instance, Web3 as the next evolution of the internet where data basically is stored on a public database which typically is typified by something like blockchain it may not ultimately take that form but that's basically how many people look at Web3 and say things that are on chain in a public database means that for the first time we can truly own our digital assets away from these centralized platforms and what that means is that network effects really what you want is to have the benefit of the network effects that that data generates but in a sort of a private database you don't know what happens you can't see inside Facebook or you can't see inside these companies so you don't know its value Now imagine in a future that would be potentially Web3 what actually what that will look like is that at the end of the day you would know who had used your data at Facebook and how much value it generated you would then know, okay maybe you generated thousands of dollars of value for Facebook the natural response for you would be to say oh should I be receiving a share for that this by the way is what Web1 was in Web1 through information we were able to transparently disclose what prices were sold for and gave rise for these transaction sort of commerce platforms whether it's in Alibaba or in eBay because I could see what the price of rice was sold in China as are in America from a Chinese farmer for instance I could say oh you know I want to basically charge more for that more importantly an intermediary might come in and say oh actually I can sell it for some kind of you know profit and I will pay you more and it creates a fair marketplace so with Web3 what happens is that data becomes a commodity now you may say okay Facebook already knows everything about us but really it's the constant evolution of the data that matters data becomes stale right it's not valuable if it doesn't if you don't keep adding to it and so where do we then move our data thereafter and that's basically where the next phase what some of us describe as Web3 but other platforms are building up to have a way of doing that so but you know it's early days in comparative speaking I think that's the opportunity and obviously platforms like Meta are also thinking how they play in this environment we also have to look at for instance how did Facebook grow they grew actually through the API economy and who basically built those economies other companies who built product on them and made them big and for what for a moment actually they were offering it to everyone and then they started to create restrictions for various business reasons for very regulatory reasons and then basically suddenly people didn't have access to it and they became inadvertently de-platformed and so this is why permissionless is important from at least our perspective because if you don't have the ability to just change the rules at any time as we have with physical property then you can actually build a stable business imagine if you owned or apparently owned your physical property and the rules kept changing every six months or every 12 months you can't invest for anything beyond the six or 12 months but if you knew you owned it because you can have for like 30, 40, 50 years then you can actually make a long-term investment and that's where interoperability and digital property rights matter because if I can actually make a long-term investment because I know it can be used in many ways and because I'm assured absolutely assured of that ownership then you can actually really enjoy the benefits of true capital formation there is a sort of thing that in some media might be perceived as negative but non-fungible tokens is one of such expression I wouldn't say it's the only expression but it's one such expression of digital property rights and we can see for instance what it's done for artists as well as for creators of any kind where they've been able to generate much more value precisely because they own those assets and they were able to receive ongoing royalties in a transparent manner because it is on chain and we see basically some of those benefits that are forming and obviously part of the working group that we have here is to try to make sure that we can make this open to all and also do it in a way that is inclusive for everyone. Well thank you very much I'd like to end by just asking each of my speakers in one line if you could summarize your thoughts in five years what does the metaverse look like what is your hope for the metaverse? Starting with you Kathy. In five years I hope we are more clear in terms of the value that the metaverse could generate through different lenses and we should have more clarity in terms of how to govern certain aspect of it as well that would be my hope. Thank you. I hope in five years that it's not a terminology that people are still trying to figure out it's an everyday practice that we don't even acknowledge that it's there because it's so ingrained in everything that we do so we don't talk about the internet because it's part of our lives so I believe in five years time the metaverse will be part of our lives whether we like it or not. I think the metaverse I mean I agree with everything but I think the metaverse also will be entirely new national economies will spring out of the metaverse like a virtual society that is real because of all the transaction value because of all the commerce that's happening on it and I actually also believe that there's going to be for the virtual governance that will take place in the metaverse almost like a new set of countries as it were and I think that's going to bring up some very interesting conversations but these are already kind of happening you could see that the platforms are actually at scale like many countries but with the metaverse with ownership we might have an opportunity where you could have sort of national virtual economies in which every user actually has a stake in it and because it is a co-owner of it instead. Thank you very much to my panel of speakers here today and to everyone in the audience and watching from home thank you and goodbye. Thank you. Thank you.