Filing: in its case against Meta's Within acquisition, the FTC asks a judge to remove some allegations of anticompetitive effects in the VR fitness app market
Context & Ripple Effects
The FTC's Within fight began chaotically — Meta reportedly learned of the regulator's opposition via a tweet rather than formal notice, and the agency never sought sworn testimony before filing. Now, ahead of the court's ruling on a preliminary injunction, the FTC is asking the judge to strike some allegations about the VR fitness app market specifically — an admission that parts of its competitive-harm case cannot survive scrutiny.
The narrowing matters because the FTC had staked the case on Within's Supernatural app proving Meta would dominate connected fitness; cutting those claims leaves the broader AR/VR argument carrying the whole challenge.
First-order effects
- Meta's acquisition review proceeds with a thinner evidentiary record against it, as the FTC voluntarily shrinks the set of harms it claims the deal would cause in VR fitness.
Second-order effects
- A case trimmed of its weakest claims still failed to persuade the courts: the judge went on to reject the FTC's preliminary injunction bid, and within weeks the agency abandoned its own administrative trial, handing Meta a final victory on the deal.
Third-order effects
- The episode shows the structural limit of the Khan FTC's approach — opposing mergers on broad market-definition arguments without deep evidentiary groundwork invites mid-case retreats, a pattern that resurfaces years later in the separate FTC v. Meta monopoly trial where Meta argues five weeks of trial proved nothing.
The trend: Aggressive FTC merger enforcement under Lina Khan is colliding with courts that demand concrete evidence, forcing the agency to narrow claims or abandon challenges outright.