I’m not saying it’s not an open standard, it’s just an open standard where the vast majority of stuff people are doing on it is for profit or within closed communities/services. Remove all the for profit stuff, remove all the closed communities from today’s internet and what’s left wouldn’t even be recognizable. Meta’s just one more thing built on top of those same open standards for data delivery, display, transfer, networking, etc. You just get some neat goggles to view it with.
Depends on if you want to sell a little or a lot. Actually, even if you want to sell a little, if you’re not making enough to defray the costs of the network connection, the power for the web server (and authentication) not to mention the raw materials cost of the thing you’re selling (if physical, or you time of development/support if digital), then it’s not worth even putting it out there. That’s the very real “tax”.
Even if a person DOESN’T want to sell, no one is going to host their content for free, they’re going to lace it with ads. I think most of rosy image of the “glory days” of the internet were experienced by folks in their college years who had access to it for “free” (tuition). The active and vibrant internet we know today has always been about profit, Meta gets there in a more streamlined fashion such that that it would be child’s play for a metaverse macrumors to exist from day one.
You're not wrong, but these things are fundamentally very different from the kind of control that Meta has over the Metaverse, and they don't really make the internet a "closed system" the way that the Metaverse is. At least not in terms of what incentivizes fragmentation. Costs of creating servers aren't really the same as a global tax saying "47.5% of every payment must be sent to us", and they are flat costs that would the same whether someone created a "second internet" or not. No matter what, you've gotta pay for servers, and you have to pay engineers to manage them.
As far as the Internet becoming filled with for-profit companies, I don't really think that's inherently a good or a bad thing. The Internet is a neutral party, the same way that the roads we drive are roads for anyone with a car. What would be worse is if the internet said "Look, EVERY website online, any payment made through it, we want 20% sent to ICANN". That would be disastrous. It would significantly cut the profits and viability of a lot of e-commerce websites, raise prices for consumer goods, and heavily encourage folks to make alternatives to the internet (fragmenting it). Some might say this would have been a good thing (brick and mortar stores certainly suffered from the Internet's rise) but change is the future, and we live in a world of fast change. It was inevitable, and if someone tried to make the Internet a closed standard when it came out, someone else would have eventually just made an alternative one that was an open standard. In other words, the outcome would have been the same.
The MetaVerse is basically doing the exact opposite of everything that led to the Internet's rise. Mark Zuckerberg seems to want to make the authoritative virtual world that lives parallel to our own, but the Metaverse is controlled by one entity that calls all of the shots and does so for profit towards that entity. As a result, it will (basically by default) incentivize fragmentation and competition in the ecosystem (as is typical in any capitalist economy, and this is healthy). Efforts to contribute to it benefit the creators who might make money on it, but if those taxes are 47.5% (or if any single entity calls all the shots), then what would benefit these creators the most would be selling on multiple platforms. It's too risky to put all of your eggs in one basket when everyone would collectively benefit from investing in alternatives to exist alongside it.
In other words, if Mark Zuckerberg tries to exert too much control over the Metaverse, he will effectively limit its capability for innovation. And when some entity limits innovation, other developers and the rest of the tech community will simply innovate around it. It works like clockwork, almost every time. And it will introduce competitors, almost inevitably.
The end result is that we won't see "one" metaverse. We will see several, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple and Microsoft (and perhaps even Google and Sony) get involved themselves in the next several years as well.
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