South Korea will issue a guideline for regulating the metaverse instead of applying existing law on video games, the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) announced at a government briefing on Wednesday.
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Fast facts
The guideline that will be used to better promote and disentangle the metaverse from video games will be prepared within this year.“We will not make the mistake of regulating a new service with an existing law,” said Park Yoon-kyu, director-general of the Office of ICT Policy under the MSIT, while acknowledging some elements of the metaverse compare with traditional video games.There is ongoing debate in South Korea on whether to designate the metaverse as a video game.South Korea currently bans online or mobile games from adopting cashable reward systems, including those using blockchain technology, to prevent excessive speculation.Recently Ifland, a local metaverse under SK Telecom, adopted a point reward system that certain users can liquidate. SK Telecom told Forkast that its metaverse is not affected by the game restrictions in Korea.The announcement is part of the first discussion under the new cross-ministerial committee overseeing the digital data industry.
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