Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan led her fellow Democrats in the agency’s majority vote to sue Meta this week, despite the staff recommending against bringing a case to challenge the company’s acquisition of Within Unlimited, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. Picture: BLOOMBERG
Agency leadership has been reluctant in the past to counter a recommendation from staff lawyers and economists, whose job it is to provide a technical assessment of whether proposed deals are anticompetitive and whether the agency has the elements to build a winning case. In the lawsuit filed against Meta on Wednesday, the FTC alleged the deal would give the social networking company a leg up in dominating the burgeoning virtual reality market. The suit represents the first time the agency has preemptively challenged an acquisition by the social media giant, which has bought more than 100 smaller companies over the past decade, according to a 2020 House report.
Meta announced last October its plan to acquire Within, the maker of the popular virtual reality fitness app Supernatural, for an undisclosed sum. The proposed deal followed Meta’s purchase of six other virtual or augmented reality app makers over the past three years, none of which were challenged by the FTC.
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