Lastowka agrees that the future of the Web is likely to be mobile and geophysical. “For the past decade or so, the data cloud has been somewhere up there, apart from the physical world. In the future, much of it will come down and be pinned to real locations, accessible through our cell phones.”

The overlay of a virtual world on the physical one means that we have to sort out whether ownership in one implies ownership in the other and how virtual rights are to be adjudicated. “I may own my home, but does that give me a right to prevent others from marking up its virtual layer with geo-local graffiti?” asks Lastowka. “The state takes an interest in zoning real space, but will it be able to zone or regulate our future geo-local layer?”

These technologies have been evolving over the past few years, offering a window for those in charge of regulation to begin anticipating the issues and exploring solu-

assets that exist only within games,” says Lastowka. “Virtual worlds raise a host of pressing legal questions—who controls them? What are the rights of their users? Are virtual properties legally real?” And how do we coordinate the rules of one layer of reality with the rules of the other? “Is it okay to defraud someone of their game currency (which has real value) if the game rules don’t forbid this?”

For questions of legal ownership of virtual property, the future may already be here—only possibly not in your neighborhood. “Countries in Asia have already started to sort out these questions in courts and legislatures,” Lastowka observes. “We are just beginning to do so in the United States.”

 

Other Faces of the New Web When you talk with Mike Liebhold about the next decade of the Web, you get more than will fit in a single article. “Cloud com-

“THE BIGGEST LEGAL QUESTION
IS: WHO CONTROLS THE SHAPE
OF THE VIRTUAL LAYER?”

tions. Lastowka suspects the implications may not have been recognized in the right quarters. “I doubt that the FCC is even considering these issues,” he says. “I think the geo-local Web will catch the law flat-footed.”

Add to that the complications of virtual realities. “Perhaps over a billion dollars is being made today through the sale ( including the unlawful sale) of virtual properties—

puting is another one of the transformation points in the history of the Internet,” he says, and begins to talk about multi-core computers offering massive storage, super-computing, and the sensor Web.

Consider just the last of these, a Web fed by sensors that we wear on our clothing or snap on a band around a wrist ( measuring blood pressure, galvanic skin response, respiration) and by sensors tied to physical