The Federal Trade Commission is suing to block Facebook owner Meta from buying Within Unlimited, a company that makes the virtual reality fitness app Supernatural, the agency announced on Wednesday. The FTC alleges that Meta is “trying to buy its way to the top” rather than compete on the merits in the VR-dedicated fitness app market, FTC Bureau of Competition Deputy Director John Newman said in a statement.
“Meta already owns a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, and it had the capabilities to compete even more closely with Within’s popular Supernatural app,” Newman said. “But Meta chose to buy market position instead of earning it on the merits. This is an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.” A Meta spokesperson said in a statement the case “is based on ideology and speculation, not evidence. The idea that this acquisition would lead to anticompetitive outcomes in a dynamic space with as much entry and growth as online and connected fitness is simply not credible.” The company spokesperson added the agency’s lawsuit sends a “chilling message to anyone who wishes to innovate in VR” and said Meta is “confident that our acquisition of Within will be good for people, developers, and the VR space.”
The lawsuit, which also names CEO and controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant, echoes issues progressive critics have said the FTC should have raised in Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp roughly a decade earlier. The FTC is already separately suing Meta for illegal monopolization of the personal social networking market, in which the agency charges that Meta used those two acquisitions to shut down nascent competitors to increase its own dominance. Meta previously sought for that lawsuit to be dismissed, though it is still moving forward in a federal court after the judge allowed the FTC to revise its complaint. When the monopolization case was first filed in 2020, Facebook’s chief counsel said the FTC was looking for a “do-over” of its original reviews of the Instagram and WhatsApp mergers, which happened years earlier.
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