FTC and Meta headed to court over VR company Within Unlimited acquisition
The Federal Trade Commission is taking Meta to court in December to challenge the tech behemoth’s acquisition of virtual reality company Within Unlimited, according to a Bloomberg report.
The hearing dates have been set from December 20 onwards for seven days, according to US District Judge Edward Davila said in San Jose, California on Monday.
Within Unlimited which has made the app, Supernatural, is one of the smaller acquisitions that Meta has been aiming to make. However, it isn’t surprising that the FTC is going after the tech giant. The chairwoman of the FTC, Lina M. Khan is known for her desire to rein in tech companies and bring some sort of regulation to their business practices.
The FTC’s argument is that by acquiring Within Unlimited, Facebook’s parent company will be poised to have a monopoly on the virtual reality market. As it stands, there are very few companies that have their own VR systems for sale. Apart from Valve’s Index, HTC’s Vive Pro, Sony’s PlayStation VR and HP’s Reverb, there are no other players in the market.
Also Read: Google in trouble as DOJ preps antitrust suit
By buying up companies working on VR technology, Meta is trying to consolidate its position as the market leader by making other technologies unavailable to others. Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 is far ahead of the competition and is barreling towards releasing its own mixed-reality headsets, before Apple does.
In fact, Meta has acquired more than 100 companies in the last decade, according to a 2020 congressional report. For Khan, Meta and other companies that are commonly associated with ‘Big Tech’ have been in her sightlines since she took over as the FTC’s chairwoman.
So much so that the FTC has stalled Amazon’s buyout of the popular robot vacuum makers iRobot. The company that made the Roomba famous and had corned 75% of the robot vacuum market was sold to Amazon for $1.7 billion. The purchase came on the heels of Amazon’s own release of a home robot, Astro, which has received middling reviews.
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