Application Dilemmas and Legal Regulation of the Metaverse

The Metaverse is a digital virtual society built on a variety of digital technologies in which virtuality and reality are connected and even real world is expanded via virtual world with people participating with digital identity. Its essence lies in sociality rather than virtuality. Although the Metaverse has gained initial application in the fields of entertainment, healthcare, education, industry and law, it still faces multidimensional dilemmas of law, ethics and technology. From the legal point of view, the application of the Metaverse may directly conflict with the right of personal information protection, the right of privacy, copyright and other rights. From the ethical point of view, the development trend of the Metaverse is incompatible with the emphasis of moral philosophy on human subjectivity. From the technical point of view, the Metaverse still faces bottleneck problems, such as poor interactive devices, weak computing power of algorithm, and imperfect economic system. In order to solve these dilemmas to a certain extent and promote the virtuous development of the Metaverse application, it is necessary to carry out legal regulation from both macro and micro levels. On the one hand, the integrated legal system centered on the real world needs to be built to promote the cross-system communication between the legal system of the real world and the algorithm of the virtual world; on the other hand, based on risk and the principle of proportionality, the application of the Metaverse needs to be regulated differently, from prohibition in principle, supervision in the whole process to industry self-regulation.