That’s why it was so important to Sweeney that his company lead the early efforts to build the Metaverse—he worried about who might take its place. “As we build these platforms for the Metaverse, if those platforms are locked up and controlled by these proprietary companies, they will have more power over our lives, our private data, and our private interactions with others than any platform has ever had before in history,” Sweeney said in May 2017. Two months later, he was even more explicit: “The power that taiwan mobile database Google and Facebook have. President Eisenhower talked about the military-industrial complex. They are a grave threat to our democracy.” As “the founder and controlling shareholder of Epic,” Sweeney “will never allow” Epic to “share user data with any other company…. We [will not] share it, sell it, or proxy access to it for advertising as many other companies have done.”
This is the sixth part of "A First Look at the Metaverse", focusing on the role of exchange tools and standards in the "Metaverse". Here, exchange tools and standards are defined as "tools, protocols, formats, services, and engines that serve as actual or de facto interoperability standards to support the creation, operation, and continuous improvement of the Metaverse. These standards support activities such as rendering, physics, and artificial intelligence, as well as the importexport of asset formats and their content, forward compatibility management and updates, tools and authoring activities, and information management.