'Many still don't know the biggest crisis of Meta Platform since changing its name from Facebook.'
A year after Facebook Inc's rebranding to Meta Platform Inc, the company is finally facing its first major crisis with President Joe Biden's administration accusing it of trying to dominate the metaverse market.
According to antitrust regulations put forward by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Meta's purchase of virtual reality (VR) application firm Within Inc will create a 'monopoly' of the virtual market and the future of the metaverse.
As a result, the FTC in July sued Meta Platform and requested a preliminary injunction to stop the purchase of Within Inc.
In defense, the lawyer representing Meta, Abby Dennis, said the bid for Within Inc was part of an effort to diversify customers and VR users.
Within Inc, which is popular with VR fitness applications, Supernatural seems to agree with the purchase of the Meta Platform based on Mark Zuckerberg's 'bullish' aspirations about the industry's fitness theme.
In fact, Meta and Within's own lawyers also described the FTC as not doing a good job in protecting the metaverse market while saying that the industry is not only focused on VR fitness themes alone.
Dennis also disputed the FTC's credibility to understand Meta's VR fitness app plans, in addition to looking down on competition in the virtual industry such as Apple Inc or Alphabet Inc and ByteDance Ltd.
However, an internal Meta document in 2021 revealed that the company plans to acquire VR developers before being 'cannibalised' by other competitors.
The same document also suggests that Zuckerberg stressed to Rade Stojsavljevic, manager of VR app developer Meta, to be more 'aggressive' in response to Apple's headphone products.
Overall, one side is seen as trying to defend the virtual market from being manipulated by one company while the other side is trying to expand its influence in the metaverse world.
