Behind Facebook lies a turbulent month with some unpleasant surprises. So the group prefers to look to the future and tries to generate headlines that have nothing to do with whistleblowers, failures or regulation: In the next five years, Facebook wants to create 10,000 new jobs in the EU in order to Building the platform of the future, “writes chief lobbyist Nick Clegg in a blog post.
This means the so-called Metaverse, the current favorite topic of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and half of Silicon Valley. The term comes from science fiction literature and describes an Internet in which the virtual and real world merge. “You can imagine the metaverse as an embodied Internet in which you not only look at content, but put it into it,” Zuckerberg recently described in an interview with The Verge.
Facebook wants to combine Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) so that people can meet and interact with each other as avatars in a digital space. What sounds like a wacky vision of the future has long since become reality. Almost 20 years ago, the virtual parallel universe “Second Life” was considered the next big thing, but hopes ended in a niche. At the moment, you can see how the Metaverse could work on the Roblox platform and the video game Fortnite: teenagers hang out there, pop stars give concerts in front of millions of fans, and investors are betting billions of dollars that the time is now right.
Zuckerberg is also convinced of this: In the future, Facebook will no longer be viewed primarily as a social media operator, but rather as a Metaverse group. He believes that this development will take place in the next five years – exactly the period in which the jobs are to be created. So far it is not known in which locations Facebook will invest how much, said a spokesman when asked. Germany is supposed to be one of the countries and is mentioned several times in the blog entry.
“VR with advertising that cannot be clicked away”
In its announcement, Facebook also emphasizes that the Metaverse is “nothing that a single company will own or operate”. The new platform should be just as open and interoperable as the Internet. This is a bold announcement for a company that has contributed like no other to transforming the once open network into a collection of closed platforms and ecosystems. In contrast to Apple and Google, Facebook does not have a mobile operating system, so Zuckerberg is placing his hopes on the Metaverse.
With its assertion, Facebook is likely to want to dispel concerns from politicians and antitrust authorities who do not want to repeat their old mistakes: For decades, states have watched helplessly as a handful of corporations transformed the Internet into a lucrative advertising marketplace. Now you have another chance to think about sensible regulation before author Wendy Liu’s prediction comes true, which explains the metaverse like this: “Virtual Reality with advertising that cannot be clicked away”.
So it is a good thing that Facebook now wants to invest in Europe. In the US, Democrats and Republicans only agree that they loathe Facebook, and there is little common ground for regulation. In contrast, the EU Parliament is working on a very specific legislative package designed to limit the power of tech platforms. It is probably not entirely by chance that Amazon, Google and Microsoft also want to invest in Europe in addition to Facebook. Until the EU’s regulatory plans become a reality, the lobbyists of the tech companies in Brussels will try to prevent excessively harsh laws – 10,000 new jobs could be a good argument.