This Special Blog is authored by Dr. Ivneet Walia, Associate Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Patiala.
Metaverse is the horizon where the physical space and the virtual space collide to provide an immersive experience. Metaverse allows people to navigate through time and space in a web of systematized world in the form of Avatar, it provides an experience close to reality. The Metaverse is not just boggling in the entertainment and the tourism zone but it is also expanding out to the e-commerce and virtual real estate. In the physical world, there are police officials and a system to combat the miscreants for maintaining law and order, but the question is regarding the provision for fighting delinquent behavior in the metaverse. Not every bit and corner of the meta world is impacted by the cyber criminals but the underground space in it is called the ‘Darkverse’.
Darkverse is a space in metaverse which is a breeding ground for the criminals that are assured anonymity, impunity and immunity in the virtual space. The darkverse is meant to facilitate the illegal activities and mischiefs. To get an access into a darkverse, the entrant must possess the correct authentication tokens. The darkverse is similar to darkweb in many ways, the only difference is that it is neither indexed not discoverable by the giant search engines. The inaccessibility and non-discoverability along with anonymity imposes an immense pressure on enforcement agencies to breakthrough these barriers. The darkverse is more dangerous than the darkweb because it facilitates the pseudo-presence of the individuals as against the online interactions provided by the darkweb. The pseudo-presence of individuals invites violent and aggressive behaviors resulting into real world crime in cyberspace for e.g., assault, harassment, etc. Interception of messages exchanged in darkverse is not possible as users depend more on location-based messages or proximity messages. As the enforcement agencies cannot audit the prevalent cyber-crimes in darkverse, the question of regulating the growth of cyber-crimes is a distant dream.
Darkverse will turn into a nightmare when this space will be misused for free speech against the government, indulged in financial scams and laundering, targeting non-fungible tokens and exploiting the virtual real estate. E-commerce will face issues when crypto currencies and digital assets take over transaction methods on one side and credibility of products will be at stake because of fake reviews and recommendations on the other end. The most difficult situation will arise when sexual assaults and murders will become an unregulated activity, leaving the enforcement agencies helpless. Darkverse will sooner become racist as the pseudo presence of the individuals in form of Avatars will bear different skin colors. What about privacy, the avatars that is created on Whatsapp and Facebook will be similar to what would be created for the metaverse. Your selection of skin color, eye shape, hair style and choice of clothes would give out volumes of information about you. Policing for metverse would become necessary. People who have experienced bullying, assault in metaverse have shared that the traumatic experiences felt real. One of the victims of metaverse crime, Nina Jane mentioned that within 60 seconds of her joining the meta space, she was abused and harassed by male avatars, who not only gangraped her avatar but rather took pictures of her avatar. The company apologized to her and accepted that crimes even if committed in meta world can feel much real. Many similar incidents have been reported where the male avatars were blocked by female avatars because of stalking, verbal abuses and assaults. As a safety measure, the companies have introduced a new feature called ‘Personal Boundary’ which prevents other avatars from intruding into your (Avatar) personal space. As per this feature, if anyone tries to trespass your boundary the system will halt, making it impossible for the other person to intrude into your demarcated space.
As the metaverse is growing, it can be termed as a ‘world within a world’ which encompasses every aspect of human existence. When the digital civilization will grow, it will demand the land and basic rights to achieve supremacy and power. Unregulated social order would lead to cyber chaos and unfiltered content will smoothly run through every corner of the virtual space resulting in data and privacy breach. The enforcement agencies today look away from these emerging issues saying that they can only manage the crime in the physical space and have no time to police activities of the gaming worlds. The world will be immersed in the waters of deep web and dark spaces on internet. The maze would drench the soulful existence of cybersapiens. Though Interpol is making every effort to keep its forces updated and keep the nations alert, but looking away from the crises would devastate the nations. The technology ethics will have to be defined and adaptation of new technologies must provide protection by design. As it will be impossible to make a law on every default, halt and shutdown.
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