Microsoft President Brad Smith said Wednesday in an interview at the Web Summit in Lisbon that the technology sector must compromise with regulators and take the concerns of governments and people seriously.
Smith went on to say that he is not sure that the tech industry has shifted as much toward solving these problems as is likely to be necessary in the coming years.
Tech companies must do more than pay lip service to regulation while resisting any government action, Smith warned.
After Facebook rebranded as Meta last week and Microsoft announced its metaverse-related projects in a blog post, Smith dampened the “hype” around the metaverse, a concept that fuses the digital and physical worlds.
“We’re all talking about the metaverse as if we’re entering some new dimension. This is not like dying and going to heaven. We’re all going to be living in the real world with people,” Smith said, calling for collaboration and interoperability in the development of the Metaverse.
Smith also stressed the importance of not letting the “hype” obscure longer-term technology trends and said he expected big tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple to eventually develop their own versions of the metaverse.