Q&A: UCLA’s Eugene Volokh on the Law of Virtual and Augmented Reality
Eugene Volokh in Atlanta, Ga., on October 7, 2014.
What about these future public spaces being owned by private companies? What sorts of trouble does that pose?
I think it’ll cause a lot of complexity. A lot will depend on whether we’ll see something like the Google or Facebook effect, where one private institution is going to get by far the dominant share of the market the way Google has with search. The more we see that, the more I think we’ll see people worry about antitrust dimensions, that the magnitude of the private power that will be somewhat not checked by the judiciary.
I’m not terribly worried, but many people are, and I think it’s something we ought to consider. I think it’s important to preserve private enterprises’ ability to provide various features and to make choices with what is its own property. But at the same time, it is true when the private entity gets powerful enough, we might be concerned enough about the private power as we are about the government power.
Then there’s going to be concerns about company misuse of that [data], but also anything that a private entity captures, the government is going to have access to as well. So they say you know this person is accused of being a drug dealer. We notice he spends a lot of his time in VR, maybe he’s making and arranging some deals in VR. He’s not delivering the drugs there, but could certainly work out the arrangements. Let’s subpoena all of the records of the VR company, of everybody he’s talked to and even the recordings of that.
See the full story here: https://www.law.com/therecorder/2018/07/19/vrs-open-call-to-litigation-qa-with-uclas-eugene-volokh-on-future-law-403-18570/?slreturn=20180623175123