FCC Transition Team co-chairs are virtual worlds nuts, too

Cory Doctorow 11:31 pm Tue Nov 18, 2008

Wagner James Au sez, "Not only are [Obama's FCC Transition Team leaders] Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford great Net Neutrality advocates, they're also into online games/virtual worlds– Werbach belongs to not one but *two* WoW guilds, and Crawford calls herself a "big fan" of Second Life. Agreeing with his guildmaster Joi Ito, Werbach's also a big supporter of WoW as a model for the future of work and software development."

“What [Warcraft] does,” he continued in that post, “is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think MMOGs will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.”

Unsurprisingly, this perspective extends to virtual worlds like Second Life, which has been an important component in Werbach’s Supernova technology conference. On her own blog, Professor Crawford, a board member at ICANN, also counts herself “a huge fan of Second Life” for the way it lets users retain IP rights to their content (though she confesses to difficulty when it comes to moving her SL avatar around.)

Obama’s FCC Transition Team Co-chair a WoW Player

See also: Net Neutrality fighters to head Obama's FCC transition team

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