The government will still look into the company's business practices even though Mark Zuckerberg can change his company's name all he wants.
The company now known as Meta is under investigation by the government for its virtual reality subsidiary, according to a report. The FTC and the state governments of New York, North Carolina, and Tennessee have spoken to the developers of virtual reality headsets.
There are concerns that Oculus is undercutting competing hardware and kneecapping third party developers. It's easy to explain the latter; the Quest 2 headset is a steal at just $299 without any requirement for a powerful PC. The Valve Index is a high-end headset that costs hundreds of dollars more than other headsets.
It's worth pointing out that competitive pricing by itself is not an antitrust violation, even though the report doesn't get into how Oculus could potentially suffer consequences for its prices. The FTC acknowledges that it would be problematic if a dominant competitor could knock its rivals out of the market and then raise prices to above-market levels for a long time.
According to developers, Meta shut down third-party Oculus apps with appealing features and then launched its own take on those ideas later on. Yur, the company that made an Oculus fitness tracker that was disabled from working within the games and made obsolete by the first-party Oculus Move function, was one example.
It may be a while before anything comes out of this probe, if anything comes out at all. The latest in a long list of government looks into Meta's operations. Meta has faced an investigation for racist hiring practices and was the subject of a Senate hearing for knowingly fostering misinformation on Facebook.
The new name hasn't changed much.
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