Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality dreams hit a roadblock when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) named him in a lawsuit involving Within Unlimited, an artificial intelligence startup. Meta Platforms Inc., had been eyeing the virtual-reality company to turn its metaverse dreams into a reality.
The FTC is now dropping Zuckerberg from the antitrust lawsuit as he has agreed not to purchase Within Unlimited, which involves the startup and its fitness application called Supernatural. The billionaire assured the FTC that he will not seek to acquire the start-up either by himself or through any of the entities he controls.
Within Unlimited: Reality
According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta Inc., had asked the FTC to drop Zuckerberg’s name from the lawsuit.
The Journal noted that the impending acquisition was in line with Meta’s rebranding as a metaverse-focused company. In June, the FTC had taken notice of Meta’s interest in Within Unlimited and filed a lawsuit to prevent the merger. The agency noted that it will “tend to create a monopoly” in the virtual-reality fitness segment and hinder healthy competition. The FTC filed a lawsuit with US District Court for the Northern District of California to stop the sale and accused Zuckerberg of violating antitrust laws.
The current lawsuit was part of the FTC Chair Lina Khan’s campaign to stringently enforce antitrust rules, nipping the problem in the bud. Although many legal experts feel her strategy might not work, as it focuses on startups in a nascent market, Khan is determined to prevent big tech from monopolizing emerging markets like virtual reality. She is well aware of the FTC’s failures in the past and hopes to redeem the agency by preventing such blunders in the future. In 2012, the agency had approved then-Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, which turned it into a social media giant.
The FTC antitrust lawsuit against Meta is one of the first major actions against a tech titan and Khan has vowed to hold corporate executives to a higher standard and prevent them from making antitrust violations.
Previously, Meta accused the FTC of stifling growth in the virtual reality space and said that the lawsuit sends “a chilling message” to those who wish to encourage innovation. John Newman, deputy director of the FTC’s bureau of competition retorted, “Instead of competing on the merits, Meta is trying to buy its way to the top.” He stressed that Meta already owns a virtual reality fitness app, top-selling VR device, and a leading app store.
Zuckerberg’s Metaverse
Last year, in October, Meta had agreed to purchase the virtual-reality company for an undisclosed amount of money. Meta has come under the FTC’s scrutiny for purchasing Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp – as the agency feels these acquisitions violated antitrust rules, helping Meta, at the time Facebook, establish its dominion in the market. Facebook had changed its name to Meta in the same month, publicly announcing its commitment to building an interactive metaverse that reflects its ambitions beyond social media.
Speaking about the name change, Mark Zuckerberg had commented, “Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started.”
In a letter, the CEO had also expressed his wish that within the next decade the metaverse will reach over a billion people, “host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.” Meta has been aggressively working on building a metaverse that will eventually be people’s ultimate playing ground. Recently, Zuckerberg shared an image of his metaverse avatar, inviting ridicule on social media for its poor graphics.
