Minimally Extractive Meta

Importantly, Apple likely cannot create a similar model. Apple isn’t a big interoperability fan.

It’s hard to imagine Meta as good for us if you just look at Facebook today, statically. Taking Facebook and making it 3D and immersive would blow. Imagine living inside this hellhole

Interoperability and ownership increase the value of digital assets. An NFT of a pair of sneakers should be more valuable than a pair of sneakers you buy in Fortnite, because you can use the NFT sneakers in many more places and because they have resale value.

The more valuable the digital economy becomes, the more valuable advertising within digital worlds becomes. Businesses can afford to pay more to acquire a customer if they know they’re going to spend more. And Meta primarily makes money through ads.

Platforms and marketplaces have a place in web3 -- OpenSea is a multi-billion dollar company -- but it charges only 2.5% fees on transactions. More value accrues to the creator and the consumer. Web 2.0 platforms and marketplaces charge a lot more than 2.5%. Airbnb takes roughly ~15% from both sides combined. eBay, which is apparently like an OpenS... See more

But there’s an equally important force, the one that keeps OpenSea in line: competition combined with portability of assets. If OpenSea were to start charging 5% or 10% or certainly 30% to sit in between sellers and buyers, people would move their business to another platform immediately. For decentralized protocols, which are open source by defaul... See more

If Sweeney is correct, along with the growing number of people who believe that the Metaverse economy will one day be larger than the meatspace economy is today, letting Apple control the Metaverse App Store would essentially give it the ability to tax a large portion of the world’s wealthiest users 30%.

Protocols can still charge fees. They shouldn’t lose money. They can become incredibly, incredibly valuable (see: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Uniswap, and on and on). But if they charge fees that are too high, they’ll lose. As Burniske put it, “Any unnecessary extraction from the process of exchange is a tax that will ultimately be weeded out by copy-paste ... See more

So it needs to create a model in which it takes a smaller piece of a larger pie in order to do what it does best: aggregate and monetize attention and commerce.