US Market
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, took the witness stand Tuesday in a trial over United States antitrust regulators’ effort to stop the tech giant from buying a virtual reality start-up called Within Unlimited.
At issue is whether Meta’s acquisition of the small company that makes a VR fitness app called Supernatural will hurt competition in the emerging virtual reality market. If the deal is allowed to go through, the US Federal Trade Commission argues, it would violate antitrust laws and dampen innovation, hurting consumers who may face higher prices and fewer options outside of platforms controlled by Meta Platforms Inc.
Meta, meanwhile, wants to poke holes in the FTC’s argument that there even exists a distinct market for what the FTC calls “VR dedicated fitness apps”.
During his testimony at the trial in San Jose, California, Zuckerberg seemed to play down the notion that fitness is a distinct, top category in VR. He said, while fitness is one “use case” for virtual reality, other uses – namely games, communication and socialising and work – have been the primary ones that Meta has been focusing on.
“While we focused on a number of use cases,” Zuckerberg said, there was a common order of popularity – with games, social and work as the top three and “sort of a longer tail” of other uses for VR that includes fitness.