Expert Takes: Axel Voss

Having now been re-elected to the European Parliament for the fourth time, what would you like to focus on during this legislative term?

Our focus on digital issues in general will involve giving existing regulations life and meaning, not creating new legislation. It’s more about enforcing existing regulations and trying to clarify and simplify them, to bring legal certainty.

However, the metaverse is on my to-do list. Here, I want to continue working in the direction of applying civil law to the metaverse. In the previous term, we adopted a report on the legal implications of virtual worlds. In this report, we wanted to answer questions on matters such as IP and company law issues in the metaverse. However, we ended up with more questions than answers.

The metaverse is becoming a platform where you can own a business, buy and sell, and so on. We need to imagine what is necessary for all these activities—for example, an identification system. We will probably need a kind of legal personality for avatars and bots and to consider what laws might be applicable and which courts are suitable.

We should also keep in mind the question of inheritance. People are buying virtual properties for a lot of money. Someday, someone will have to decide what will happen to these properties. This touches on several aspects of civil law that exist in the offline world. Can these be transferred to the online world? Will we have to make adjustments?

You mentioned the need for an identification system in the metaverse. Why do you think this is important?

We created the Internet, and twenty years later realised it’s developing in ways we don’t always like—for example, online hate and crime. It’s hard to catch up with regulation and make corrections later.

I don’t want a “dark metaverse” where organised crime and the mafia can thrive. We must therefore secure the metaverse, which also means we need to come to an agreement on some sort of identification system. Cars have licence plates. When drivers don’t behave correctly, they can be identified. We need to think about how the equivalent can be best done in the metaverse.

But this won’t be easy. We are talking about moving from a largely anonymous Internet to the metaverse in which individuals are identifiable. So we will need to move forward in small steps.

As one of the driving forces behind the EU AI Act, how do you think this legislation will play out as compared to other, potentially competing AI regulation strategies, such as those from the UK and the US?

I’m a little concerned that western democracies are splitting up too much and creating frameworks that might not be compatible. There is already a split between western democracies and states that are not interested in democracy. That is why I think it’s really important that the western world finds common positions or standards. They don’t have to be identical, but they should be oriented towards the same values.

I would like to see more initiatives that contribute to the convergence of these different frameworks, so we have a common idea of how we move forward with AI and virtual worlds, and to ensure this is based on our fundamental values. This is a big challenge, but I enjoy trying to find solutions—and for those, we need to have discussions. So we must exchange ideas on what might be possible and then find a way forward.

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