WASHINGTON: Federal regulators on Wednesday took legal action to block Facebook parent Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg from acquiring virtual reality company Within Unlimited and its fitness app Supernatural, asserting the deal would hurt competition and violate antitrust laws.
Experts said it was the Federal Trade Commission’s first legal challenge to a Big Tech merger.
The FTC filed a complaint in federal court in San Francisco against the tech giant based in Menlo Park, California, and its high-profile CEO seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the proposed acquisition.
The regulators said that Meta already is a key player “at each level of the virtual reality sector,” owning the top-selling device, a leading app store, seven of the most successful developers in the sphere and one of the best-selling apps of all time.
The FTC alleged that Meta and Zuckerberg plan to expand that VR empire by attempting to illegally acquire a dedicated fitness app.
Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Meta began a campaign to conquer virtual reality in 2014 with its acquisition of headset maker Oculus VR. Since then, Meta’s VR headsets have become the cornerstone of its growth in the virtual reality space, according to the complaint. Fueled by the popularity of its top-selling Quest headsets, Meta’s Quest Store has become a leading US app platform with more than 400 apps available to download, it says.
Meta rejected the regulators’ claims.
“The FTC’s case is based on ideology and speculation, not evidence,” the company said in a statement. “By attacking this deal ... the FTC is sending a chilling message to anyone who wishes to innovate in VR. We are confident that our acquisition of Within will be good for people, developers and the VR space.”
The FTC vote to block the acquisition was 3-2, with Chair Lina Khan and the other two Democratic commissioners approving it and the two Republicans opposed.
The action marked a new FTC salvo against Meta — the owner of Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp in addition to Facebook — in the agency’s drive against what it views as anticompetitive conduct in the tech industry. The FTC filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Facebook in late 2020, as the government pursued its most significant attempt to buttress competition since its historic case against Microsoft two decades ago.
In the broad antitrust suit, the FTC is seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the popular Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services, or a restructuring of the company. Its core theory is that Meta is a monopoly engaging in anticompetitive conduct.
In the complaint against the Within Unlimited acquisition, the FTC cites a 2015 email from Zuckerberg to key Facebook executives saying that his vision for “the next wave of computing” was control of apps as well as the platform on which those apps are distributed. The email says a key part of this strategy is for the company to be “completely ubiquitous in killer apps,” which are apps that prove the value of the technology.
Meta bought seven of the most successful virtual-reality development studios, and now has one of the largest first-party virtual-reality content catalogs in the world, the FTC says. It cites the acquisition of the Beat Games studio, giving Meta control of the popular app Beat Saber.
The FTC action ensures that “Facebook earns, rather than buys, its place in the emerging virtual and augmented reality sector,” Krista Brown, senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement. “This is the agency’s first challenge to a big tech merger, and it represents its new commitment to protecting fair competition in nascent digital markets. The effects of Facebook’s pending acquisition of Within ... would reduce innovation and competition in a sector just getting off the ground.”
FTC acts to block Meta from buying VR company, fitness app
https://arab.news/mr4mn
FTC acts to block Meta from buying VR company, fitness app
- The action marked a new FTC salvo against Meta, in the agency’s drive against what it views as anticompetitive conduct in the tech industry.
To infinity and beyond: Grendizer’s 50 years of inspiring Arabs
- 50 years after its creation, the Grendizer anime series continues to capture Arab imagination
- Arab News Japan speaks to creator Go Nagai, Middle Eastern fans and retells the story behind the UFO Robot tasked with protecting our planet
LONDON: Few cultural imports have crossed borders as unexpectedly, or as powerfully, as Grendizer, the Japanese giant robot that half a century ago became a childhood hero across the Arab world, nowhere more so than in Saudi Arabia.
Created in Japan in the mid-1970s by manga artist Go Nagai, Grendizer was part of the “mecha” tradition of giant robots. The genre was shaped by Japan’s experience during the Second World War, and explored themes of invasion, resistance and loss through the medium of science fiction.
But while the series enjoyed moderate success in Japan, its true legacy was established thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East.
The anime “UFO Robot Grendizer” arrived on television in the region in 1979, dubbed into Arabic and initially broadcast in Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. The story it told of the heroic Duke Fleed, a displaced prince whose planet had been destroyed by alien invaders, struck a chord with children growing up amid regional conflict and occupation by Israel.
Its themes of defending one’s homeland, standing up to aggression and protecting the innocent were painfully relevant in the region, transforming the series from mere entertainment into a kind of emotional refuge.
Much of the show’s impact came from its successful Arabization. The powerful Arabic dubbing and emotionally charged voice-acting, especially by Lebanese actor Jihad El-Atrash as Duke Fleed, lent the show a moral gravity unmatched by other cartoons of the era.
The theme song for the series, performed by Sami Clark, became an anthem that the Lebanese singer continued to perform at concerts and festivals right up until his death in 2022.
By the early 1980s, “Grendizer” had spread across the Middle East, inspiring fandoms in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and beyond. For many, it was not only their first exposure to anime, it also delivered lessons on values such as justice and honor.
Grendizer was so influential in the region that it became the subject of scholarly research, which in addition to recognizing the ways in which the plight of the show’s characters resonated with the audience in the Middle East, also linked the show’s popularity to generational memories of displacement, particularly the Palestinian Nakba.
Half a century later, “Grendizer” remains culturally alive and relevant in the region. In Saudi Arabia, which embraced the original version of the show wholeheartedly, Manga Productions is now introducing a new generation of fans to a modernized version of the character, through a video game, The Feast of The Wolves, which is available in Arabic and eight other languages on platforms including PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, and a new Arabic-language anime series, “Grendizer U,” which was broadcast last year.
Fifty years after the debut of the show, “Grendizer” is back — although to a generation of fans of the original series, their shelves still full of merchandise and memorabilia, it never really went away.
