Top Three Sources' Views and TSO Validation Conclusion: Source 1 (Internet Policy Review) believes that the legal authority of the metaverse is no longer controlled by a single state but is distributed among states, platforms, protocol designers, and user communities. The validation conclusion is: there is no single authority; a layered, multi-center governance model is needed to distribute legal functions to achieve legitimacy, legitimacy, effectiveness, and auditability.
Commonly Acknowledged Facts: The metaverse is an interconnected space composed of immersive, persistent, and data-intensive environments, with core characteristics including "persistence" (ownership of virtual assets) and "embodiment" (interaction through digital identities and biometric data). This environment challenges traditional legal definitions of territory because the architecture of virtual environments does not fully correspond to physical territory.
Main Disagreements or Differences: The fundamental disagreement regarding governance models is that the traditional hierarchical model (state-centric) cannot effectively govern the metaverse and needs to shift to a polycentric governance model, viewing legal authority as distributed, shared, and overlapping.
Background and Analysis: The emergence of the metaverse, combined with spatial computing, virtual economies, and identity systems, is reshaping existing regulatory pressures. It introduces technical challenges, such as real-time rendering, high data density, and biometric tracking, which make traditional laws like GDPR difficult to apply regarding data minimization and purpose limitation principles. At the institutional level, the metaverse distributes power among platform companies (environment design), protocol designers (defining data flows), and user communities (establishing norms).
Summary of Three Sources' Views: Source 1 emphasizes the distributed nature of power and proposes a "layered function allocation framework" as a core concept; other sources (if any) need to be compared regarding the effectiveness of this framework at different governance levels.
Conclusion: The key to building metaverse order lies in accepting the reality of distributed power and designing a layered governance structure capable of addressing technical complexity (such as the constraints of the AI Act on biometric identification) and institutional reshaping (such as cross-border enforcement lessons from GDPR).