Davos, Switzerland, Jan 18 (EFE).- Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has identified Europe, India and the United States as key future markets for the tech giant’s Metaverse, the company’s integrated space unifying its three main social media platforms.

Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister and now Meta’s head of global affairs, warned that those three territories would have to remain aligned with the company’s principles and values.

“If India were to swing towards a Chinese paradigm, I think that would have very profound implications. But that doesn’t seem to be the case,” Clegg told Efe.

Despite China’s dynamic digital economy, Clegg said, it “is walled off from the rest of the world and heavily surveilled within.”

China’s isolation from the rest of the world represents a “very promising” opportunity for India, Europe, and the US to “broadly align on roughly the same kind of principles,” he said.

Speaking with journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Clegg also discussed the challenges of an increasingly globalized internet and the role the Metaverse will play in an interconnected virtual world.

Despite “not being the home of any major global tech entities,” the former UK deputy PM said, Europe is a world leader in regards to regulation, while India is ”the most important swing state because of its sheer size and its excellence in the digital realm.”

“If you look at the latest proposals from the current Indian government for regulation of privacy and data, they are moving in quite a thoughtful direction,” Clegg said.

China on the other hand, he said, has “a very vibrant digital economy, highly digitalized form of communication and payments and so on. But it is based on a very different set of values.” EFE

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