Lina Khan's attempt to block Meta's Within acquisition upends decades of antitrust standards and could shift how DC regulates competition in nascent industries
Lina Khan may set off a shift in how Washington regulates competition by filing cases in tech areas before they mature.
New York TimesCecilia Kang
Context & Ripple Effects
Khan’s challenge to Meta’s Within deal extends an antitrust project that had already sought to reframe concentrated power, from her earlier critique of Amazon to the FTC’s use of monopsony theory in Big Tech enforcement. The significance is not only the transaction but the timing: Washington is being asked to intervene before the relevant market is mature.
The action also exposes the internal and legal constraints on that approach. Related reporting says Khan overruled FTC staff to bring the Within case, while antitrust experts had identified a conservative judiciary as the principal obstacle to her broader agenda.
First-order effects
Meta and Within face an immediate FTC effort to stop their transaction, putting the agency’s theory of competition in a nascent market before a court.
Khan’s FTC commits institutional credibility to earlier-stage merger enforcement despite the reported staff disagreement over the case.
Second-order effects
A court fight forces the FTC to translate Khan’s broader antitrust framework into a legally durable case, with the judiciary’s skepticism shaping how aggressively the agency can pursue similar deals.
Large technology companies considering acquisitions in emerging categories gain a new regulatory risk factor: the absence of a mature market may no longer deter an FTC challenge.
Third-order effects
If courts accept early intervention against acquisitions in developing markets, merger review would shift toward preserving future competition rather than proving harm in an established market.
If the challenge fails on prevailing legal standards, the conservative judiciary identified in related coverage may continue to limit Khan’s effort to broaden US antitrust enforcement.
The trend: US tech antitrust is moving toward testing whether merger law can police concentration before emerging markets fully form.
The F.T.C.'s lawsuit is a “deliberately experimental case that seeks to extend the boundaries of merger enforcement” “This is such an extreme and unfounded reaction to a small deal that many are worrying about what an F.T.C. win would mean for start-ups” https://www.nytimes.com/.…
I mean do people who think it's too early to enforce antitrust law in VR favor going back and reversing deals like facebook/instagram once it's clear they're hampering competition? I'm pretty sure they don't.
This is exactly what people would have said if the government had tried to stop facebook's acquisition of instagram in 2012. And in retrospect I think it's clear they should have done that. https://twitter.com/...
“The FTC accused Facebook of building a virtual reality “empire,” beginning in 2014 with its purchase of Oculus, the maker of the Quest virtual-reality headset. Since then, Facebook has acquired around 10 virtual-reality app makers,” https://www.nytimes.com/...
Let's see how it plays out as a case, but hats off to @linakhanFTC for taking on issues of potential competition that previous antitrust enforcers have shied from: https://www.nytimes.com/.... I have been pretty skeptical of her tenure and this may still fail, but it's
Excellent news. Big Tech says this kind of aggressive antitrust enforcement will stifle innovation, because it will discourage VC investment in startups that hope to cash out by selling to the big companies. But what if it instead encourages better ideas? https://www.nytimes.com/…
If Meta made a really good VR fitness app, it could put the smaller biz behind Supernatural of business. Who wins then? If it made a shitty app, it would just mean metaverse users who also want a good VR fitness program can't do so in an integrated way
If existing fitness programs suck or get too pricey, new competitors will swoop in. We don't need government to freeze existing ownership in time for this to be the case
The world isn't down one VR fitness app if Meta buys Supernatural, it just has one (of a number of VR/AR fitness offerings) with a different owner... https://twitter.com/...
Reading the @FTC lawsuit against @Meta, I'm struggling to understand who benefits from an entire bullet point being redacted. @linakhanFTC https://twitter.com/...
Lina Khan took charge of the FTC on the promise of recasting the debate on anti-competitive behaviour. Her agency's lawsuit to stop Meta from buying a small start-up is the first major act to put that philosophy to the test. Full analysis with @stef_palma: https://www.ft.com/...
pause and notice how a single, isolated act of preemptively thwarting harmful concentration before it metastasizes and harms markets/consumers is framed as something utterly radical and dangerous https://www.nytimes.com/...
she's doing the bare minimum to stop a predatory tech giant (Meta) with a decade+ history of capturing and killing competitors from doing the same thing to a fledgling AR/VR industry and it's as if she set the fucking queen on fire
Plus, you know that if Meta made its own VR fitness app and took any steps to compete with existing products like Supernatural, the FTC & Congress would also accuse them of illegal monopolist behavior for doing that 🙄
Gotta say, I don't envy Meta here. Try to buy it and the FTC says “no build your own”. Try to build your own and the community says “you're an idea thief.” https://twitter.com/...
This is the correct way to deal w/attempts to create monopolies : “At the heart of the F.T.C.'s lawsuit is.. that regulators can apply antitrust law w/o waiting for a market to mature to the point where it is clear which companies hold the most power.” https://www.nytimes.com/...…
I spoke with @ceciliakang about the FTC's new challenge to Meta-Within: “This is such an extreme and unfounded reaction to a small deal that many tech industry leaders are already worrying about what an F.T.C. win would mean for start-ups.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
@anshelsag ... Very likely these are being redacted in order to conceal information which is not public concerning Meta, an Within, or another company. I don't know for sure, but I doubt the FTC is in the practice of redacting the sway public opinion.
The @FTC argument re: @Meta/@WITHIN is that but for the acquisition, a dominant platform would have vertically integrated. So, vertical integration is good now?
It seems any steps Meta takes to develop new products & business lines, authorities are gonna call anti-competitive. But Facebook and its business model are dying. And authorities also want to make it get rid of Insta & WhatsApp...
... it really doesn't make sense anyway to have the federal gov concerned with competition for competition's sake. We're not talking about finite goods/resources where 1 or a few could do some dastardly deeds & deprive people of or artificially inflate prices for a necessity...