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</figure>The giant celebrity nude photo scandal that left no cultural footprint.
In 2007, High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens, the new darling of the Disney Channel, had her personal nude photographs leaked to the internet. One of the oddest things about what ensued was how loud the outrage was when the leak occurred in 2007, and how little anyone seems to think about it now.
Hackers first leaked Hudgens’s private photos after the release of High School Musicals 1 and 2 but before 3. The world was shocked. Disney moms pronounced Hudgens “ruined.” OK! confidently reported that she would be dropped from High School Musical 3 and replaced by one of the Cheetah Girls. Hudgens released a chagrined statement taking responsibility for the photos (“I want to apologize to my fans, whose support and trust means the world to me”), and Disney made its own statement regretting Hudgens’s “lapse in judgment.” Days after the pictures leaked, Hudgens was photographed by paparazzi at a church, as though to cleanse her reputation. “Baby V she is no longer :(” lamented Just Jared.
But today, the moment barely figures in Hudgens’s public image. Now 33 years old, Hudgens is remembered as that girl from High School Musical, from Grease Live, from The Princess Switch. Most people associate her with singing and dancing, with her luminous smile, with lightly offensive TikToks about how we should just let some people die of Covid, with a bunch of direct-to-streaming movies that you know ahead of time are going to be as bland and weirdly satisfying as a fast food burger. So many other female stars have had nude photo scandals by now that who can remember Vanessa Hudgens’s? It barely rates.
Looking at how fast and furious the flame of public reaction burned in the response to Hudgens’s photos makes for a vivid illustration of just how fast and how drastically the ways we talk about women’s sexuality have changed over the past 15 years — and, in small and crucial ways, how they haven’t.
When Vanessa Hudgens’s nude photos leaked, we were in the penultimate year of the Bush administration, and one year away from the publication of the book that best chronicled the sexual mores of the era: Jessica Valenti’s The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women.
“More than 1,400 purity balls, where young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers at a promlike event, were held in 2006 (the balls are federally funded),” Valenti reported. “Facebook is peppered with purity groups that exist to support girls trying to ‘save it.’ Schools hold abstinence rallies and assemblies featuring hip hop dancers and comedians alongside religious leaders. … Whether it’s delivered through a virginity pledge or a barely dressed tween pop singer writhing across the television screen, the message is the same: A woman’s worth lies in her ability — or refusal — to be sexual.”
Hudgens was one of the girls whose worth lay in her refusal.
She became famous at age 15, when she starred opposite a baby-faced Zac Efron in the Disney Channel original movie High School Musical. The flick, a quasi-retread of Grease in which absolutely everyone was too pure to be pink, became a massive hit, picking up 160 million viewers after its premiere in 2006. And Hudgens’s palpable innocence was at the center of it.
Hudgens played Gabriella, a sweet nerd newly arrived at East High. Terrified of being boxed in as the scary math genius at her new school the way she had been at her last, Gabriella instead finds herself accidentally auditioning for the winter musical, facing down East High’s intimidating theater kids in the process. Inspired by Gabriella’s beauty, innocence, and bravery, Zac Efron’s Troy, the macho school jock, admits that he, too, loves to sing and dance, and he, too, auditions for the winter musical.
Gabriella is an icon of sorts for Disney’s ideal of femininity at the time, an example of the kind of girl Disney thought the little girls in the audience should aspire to be. We are told she is smart, a quality mainly demonstrated by her offscreen win at academic decathalon, and that she is kind, a quality mainly demonstrated by her ability to be nice to other boys when the plot demands that Troy become jealous. She is afraid of the spotlight because nice girls are not ambitious, but when pushed into it against her will, she performs admirably. She is unfailingly supportive of Troy’s hopes and dreams, because High School Musical is very much a showcase for Troy in which Gabriella features mainly as a lovely trophy. At the start of the third act of each movie, she breaks up with him to teach him that he has strayed from the path of goodness, and then she sings a sad ballad and then Troy sings an angry ballad.
Disney Channel’s key demographic was and remains kids between the ages of 6 and 14, so any suggestion of sex was out of the question. So pure is Gabriella’s relationship with Troy that they don’t even kiss onscreen until the end of High School Musical 2. Gabriella wears sensible mid- length skirts and one-piece swimsuits. (Efron, it must be admitted, does take off his shirt in the final movie, in a moment that caused audible yelping from the audience when I saw it in theaters in 2008. As ever, boys get more leeway in these things.)
Like many of pop culture’s good girls, Gabriella’s goodness is emphasized by a bad girl foil, Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale). Sharpay, too, is sexless. Her badness is emphasized not by any suggestion of Rizzo- like sluttiness, but by her hyperfemininity, her girly obsession with pink, and her Hilton-esque tiny dog. Sharpay is the reckless striver to Gabriella’s passive achiever. While Gabriella eschews the spotlight unless pushed, Sharpay issues her demands each movie in a rapid-paced “I want” song, and her vindictive scheming is always what sets the plot in motion. At the end of each movie, Sharpay is punished for her high-maintenance ways, while Gabriella is rewarded for her passivity and sweetness.
Gabriella’s passivity and her sexual purity are closely linked. As Valenti lays out in The Purity Myth, the virginal ideal of the Bush era was essentially an ideal by absence: absence of desire, of provocation, of wants of one’s own. “We’re defined by what we don’t do,” Valenti concludes. “Our ethics are the ethics of passivity.”
Disney’s good girls were often held up as the role models families needed in the age of Girls Gone Wild raunch culture, a wholesome and much-needed antidote to the Disney-gone-bad Britneys and Christinas of the world. But Disney’s virginal ideal was less a counter to the midriff-baring bad girls of the ’00s than she was the other side of the same old virgin/whore coin. Valenti cites Lakshmi Chaudhry’s In These Times on this issue.
“Make no mistake, raunch is Republican,” wrote Chaudhry. “The sexuality that reigns supreme in Bush World bears the basic imprimaturs of right-wing ideology: gross materialism, sexual hypocrisy, and acquiescence in the name of empowerment. It is in every sense a conservative wet dream come true.”
It doesn’t take much, in other words, to flip the switch from a good girl to a bad girl. Which is why when pictures leaked of Vanessa Hudgens posing naked, effectively giving the lie to the Gabriella persona, watching moms knew immediately what was going to happen to her: She’d be ruined.
And she almost was. But then, faster than you would have thought, the story died away.
Hudgens’s nude photographs were first reported by the National Enquirer in September 2007, and within a week they were scattered across the internet on different sites. The reaction was as bad as by now we should know to expect.
The conventional wisdom of the era was that only sluts and stupid girls took nude photos of themselves, and that once the photos existed, no one could reasonably expect to keep them out of the public’s hands. While from the perspective of the 2020s, Hudgens was clearly the victim of a gross invasion of her privacy, in 2007 Hudgens was expected to take the blame for the photos.
Hudgens took her medicine. She accepted the blame, kept her head down, and finished out her term in the High School Musical franchise with a minimum of scandal. But while she sweated out the consequences of her hacker’s actions, the context of this whole story was about to change very rapidly.
The Hudgens photo scandal didn’t only emerge at the tail end of the virginity-obsessed Bush era. It also emerged at the beginning of the camera phone era. The development in technology meant that nude photos were in the process of becoming an increasingly common part of modern courtship — and celebrity nude photos showing up on the internet, in turn, were about to become a staple of the gossip press.
The same year that Hudgens’s nudes leaked, Kim Kardashian saw her sex tape hit the internet after her boyfriend intentionally leaked it. In 2009, hackers leaked nudes of Rihanna, Leighton Meester, and Ashley Greene, among others. In 2010, nudes leaked of Hayley Williams, Blake Lively, Jessica Alba, Kat Dennings, Miley Cyrus, Christina Aguilera, Amber Rose, and Kesha. In 2011, it was Lady Gaga, Scarlett Johansson, and Madonna.
“Now we’re to the point where two celebs can have nude leaks in one day and no one hardly bats an eye,” mused the pop culture website Complex in 2012. (Olivia Munn and Christina Hendricks were the celebs in question.) “We have it so easy these days. Who do you want to see naked?” All you had to do was wait. The internet would deliver.
As this veritable flood of nude celebrity photos made its way onto the internet, the stories we told about those photos began to shift. At a certain point, people had to admit, taking nude pictures seemed less like a particularly kinky perversion and more like just a thing a lot of people were doing these days. It might not even be particularly shameful.
WIth this change in the narrative, a new and more uncomfortable question began to emerge. Was it possible that it was not the women who were wrong for photographing their own naked bodies, but instead the hackers who stole those pictures and distributed them across the internet? Was it possible that it was even wrong for regular people on the internet just to look at the pictures, even if they weren’t the ones who stole them?
In 2014, hackers released a massive photo dump of nude celebrity selfies. The private pictures of dozens of famous actresses raced across the internet, including photos of Jennifer Lawrence, then at arguably the height of her fame. By now, there was a new conventional wisdom in the air when it came to the subject of nude photos.
“Consider this,” instructed Complex. “These women, regardless of their public persona, are entitled to privacy and to express their sexuality however they wish. It’s their basic human right. These women have lives, too.” We were a long way from, “Who do you want to see naked?” and it had only been two years.
The scandal that had once threatened to ruin Vanessa Hudgens drifted gently out of public consciousness. What young female celebrity hadn’t had a nude photo scandal by now? And who didn’t realize that the fault lay with the hackers and not the celebrity?
By the time Me Too rocketed into public focus in 2017, the idea that only sluts and morons took nude photos of themselves and that the public was entitled to see all the naked pictures of actresses it wanted had well and truly died. But the other half of the binary Hudgens represented — the Gabriella half, the archetype of innocence and virginity and passivity — that half would be harder to shake.
Gabriella is still a beloved archetype of teen innocence and youth. She still represents a powerful ideal of who girls should be: unambitious and unneedy, undesiring and uncomplaining, smart and kind but only insofar as those traits remain unthreatening to men. And she lives on in a thousand network police procedurals and children’s TV shows, in web series and YA novels, in Hallmark movies and Netflix rip-offs of Hallmark movies alike. In the Princess Switch franchise, one of those Netflix rip-offs of a Hallmark movie, Hudgens plays three characters, and she only meaningfully departs from the Gabriella archetype in one of them. (Fiona’s more of a Sharpay.)
This character is good less because of what she does than because of what she doesn’t do, her virtue inscribed in the negative space where her character should be. She is, as Valenti argued, good by default, good by virtue of her passivity. She’s what girls learn, still, that they should aspire to be. And it’s hard to imagine that she will ever die.
Antibiotic resistance is approaching a crisis point, and the world needs to act.
Two years ago, the CDC made a disturbing prediction: Without radical change to antibiotic use practices, drug-resistant pathogens, which at that point were estimated to cause 700,000 deaths globally every year, could kill 10 million people per year by 2050.
A recent report published in The Lancet, however, found that the toll from antibiotic resistance is worsening even faster than expected.
Last month’s Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) project report estimates that, in 2019, about 1.27 million people died directly due to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which means cases where the patient wouldn’t have died had their infection been treatable with standard antibiotics. The total rises to 4.95 million deaths once fatalities associated with a drug-resistant infection, meaning that a patient died while having an identified antibiotic-resistant infection but it wasn’t clearly the immediate cause of death, are also included.
The report includes data on 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations in 204 countries and territories in 2019, with statistical modeling used to produce estimates for regions missing data.
The new numbers means that AMR is now among the leading causes of death worldwide, exceeding the toll of HIV/AIDS and malaria (864,000 and 643,000 deaths in 2019 respectively, according to the Lancet’s Global Burden of Disease study). HIV research attracts close to $50 billion per year in funding, but as Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy noted in a commentary published along with the Lancet study, “global spending on addressing AMR is probably much lower than that.”
In the last century, antibiotics have revolutionized medicine, massively cutting down mortality from common infectious diseases, while drastically improving the safety of major surgery and recovery rates from trauma. By one estimate, antibiotics have extended average human life expectancy by more than 20 years since their discovery over a century ago.
But the overuse of antibiotics, whether in human patients or in livestock, results in bacteria adapting to the drugs, leading them to become less effective over time. If the pace of resistance isn’t halted — whether through more judicious use of the drugs or through the development of new classes of antibiotics — it will likely lead to soaring deaths from common infections and surgical complications, sending us back to a world where a minor cut could potentially once again be lethal.
We can avoid this fate, but it will require coordinating a global response before it’s too late.
Antibiotics are drugs that kill or prevent reproduction of disease-causing bacteria, without directly harming the patient’s cells. The invention of the first antibiotics changed everything, offering nothing short of a miraculous cure for severe pneumonia or wound infections that might have otherwise left patients dead.
But due to their ability to rapidly reproduce — staphylococcus, for example, can double every two hours when colonizing the human nose — and to directly exchange fragments of genetic code, bacterial pathogens evolve far more rapidly than multicellular organisms like humans. When a mutation arises that conveys resistance to an antibiotic, a large population of resistant pathogens can rapidly result, and the mutation can then be shared with other lineages of pathogen if they come into contact with each other.
Every time a patient is treated with antibiotics while a given pathogen is present, it’s a roll of the dice for a new resistance mutation to emerge. This isn’t just for human patients; the use of antibiotics for disease prevention and faster growth of livestock, which accounts for two-thirds of the total medically important antibiotics sold by weight in the US, is also a major contributor to AMR.
Resistance can develop with remarkable speed. Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, was first documented in 1961, just one year after the antibiotic methicillin was introduced. MRSA is actually something of a misnomer, as the pathogen is resistant to two major classes of antibiotics, penicillins and cephalosporins.
The first outbreak was documented in a Boston hospital in 1968, and for several decades most MRSA infections were seen in hospitals or other health care settings. However, by the early 2000s, community-acquired cases were rising even as hospital spread decreased. In 2019, according to the Lancet report, MRSA directly caused more than 100,000 deaths.
Resistance is the inevitable result of using antibiotics. The best we can hope for is to delay it, mitigate the consequences, and buy time for the development of new antibiotics that bacteria haven’t yet evolved resistance to.
The Lancet study identifies three ways to slow the march of antibiotic resistance: more selective use of antibiotics, tighter infection control measures, and rapid investment in new treatments.
While the best practices for antibiotic usage in medicine are well established, they’re not always followed. Antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections — meaning they’ll do nothing for a viral illness like influenza — and should be given only when medically necessary for an identified bacterial infection. However, a 2016 study estimates that 30 percent of the antibiotic prescriptions given in clinic visits are unnecessary.
Treatment should always start with the most narrow-spectrum antibiotic, saving for later the “big guns” — broad spectrum antibiotics, which are important to keep in reserve so they remain effective with the sickest patients, as well as newer drugs with less established resistance. Once treatment is started, it’s important for patients to finish the full course; incomplete treatment can result in a surviving population of the disease pathogen, selected for resistance, which can then infect others and spread.
Cutting down on the use of antibiotics in farming is also essential. The low-dose, prolonged regimens given to increase the rate of growth in farm animals creates ideal conditions for pathogens to evolve resistant strains, at which point these pathogens can spread to affect humans. Denmark has been a world leader here, drastically restricting non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in healthy animals solely for disease prevention and faster weight gain, but the US has yet to follow suit.
Preventing the transmission of infections within hospitals is also an essential measure to minimize the death toll from resistant bacteria; hospital-acquired infections are a major concern, with an estimated 650,000 cases annually in the US alone, and drug-resistant pathogens are much harder to treat, so maintaining isolation measures and the appropriate use of protective equipment is key.
One complication is that patients can be asymptomatic carriers without being sick, unknowingly spreading resistant bacteria. US hospitals will often test all newly admitted patients for MRSA and vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (VRE), two of the most common community- transmitted antibiotic resistant pathogens, so that carriers can be isolated from patients at risk of severe illness.
This means that reliable testing and data collection is essential to keep track of and slow the spread of resistant bacteria. That’s a particular challenge for lower-income countries; they lack the resources to test and screen patients as reliably, and they often have a shortage of and sanitation supplies. Those failings matter for rich countries as well — a globalized world means that novel resistant pathogens anywhere will present a risk elsewhere.
These control measures can buy time for pharmaceutical research companies to invest in developing new generations of antibiotics to replace existing treatments as pathogens acquire resistance to them. But progress on new antibiotics has been slow. Truly novel options — not simply tweaks on existing drugs — are what is most needed to stop drug-resistant pathogens, but the last entirely original class of antibiotics, lipopeptides, was discovered in the late 1980s.
Despite the desperate need, pharmaceutical companies are less incentivized to overcome the scientific, regulatory, and financial challenges involved in approving a new antibiotic — especially when the opportunity for profit is limited. Successfully developing an effective and nontoxic new antibiotic is a long and complex process; since 2014, more than half of the drugs being tested were discontinued before reaching the approval stage. According to a 2017 estimate, a single successful antibiotic costs $1.5 billion to bring to market, whereas the expected annual revenue per drug is less than $50 million per year.
Since the most powerful antibiotics are held in reserve as much as possible and then prescribed only as short-term treatment for acute infections, they bring in much less revenue than drugs for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure or Type 2 diabetes.
As Kevin Outterson, a Boston professor who studies antibiotic resistance, told my colleague Sigal Samuel, the problem is that “this is a product where we want to sell as little as possible. The ideal would be an amazing antibiotic that just sits on a shelf for decades, waiting for when we need it. That’s great for public health, but it’s a freaking disaster for a company.” Governments and other funders need to respond by implementing financial incentives for companies, funding academic research, or other significant changes to the current regulatory framework.
There is some good news on this front. The use of animal antibiotics decreased by 3 percent between 2019 and 2020, and the EU recently banned antibiotic administration to healthy animals. But this is far from enough.
Antimicrobial resistance has been a hidden epidemic, less visibly front and center than Covid-19, but the world cannot afford to wait to act until it reaches a crisis point.
The company’s new direction is already sparking government scrutiny.
This story is part of a Recode series about Big Tech and antitrust. Over the next few weeks, we’ll cover what’s happening with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google.
It wasn’t immediately clear what Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do with Oculus when Facebook bought the virtual reality headset maker back in 2014. Those plans are now coming into focus: Facebook is now called Meta, and it’s not just a social media company, it’s a metaverse company. And as the new name implies, Meta wants to win in this space, just as Facebook won in social media.
But a growing group of regulators, politicians, and advocacy groups are raising concerns about Meta’s plans in this realm.
The company formerly known as Facebook spent nearly two decades cementing its position as the biggest social media company in the world — in large part by buying other social media startups, like Instagram and WhatsApp. Critics have accused Mark Zuckerberg and his company of using a “copy-acquire-kill” strategy to pressure its would-be competition into selling or risk being crushed by Facebook.
Now, some are concerned that Meta may be employing the same tactics in the metaverse, a concept that Zuckerberg describes as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” In practical terms, the metaverse is a virtual space where people wearing AR/VR headsets can interact with each others’ avatars, play games, have meetings, and so on. While Meta is still in the early stages of developing the futuristic hardware and software that will make this possible, the company is already a market leader. Meta’s VR headsets made up an estimated 75 percent of all AR/VR headset shipments in the first quarter of 2021. And as Recode’s Peter Kafka has reported, the social media giant has been quietly buying up companies in the metaverse, acquiring at least five AR/VR-related companies in the past year.
Regulators are paying attention. The FTC and several state attorneys general are investigating whether Meta is using monopolistic practices in the AR/VR market, according to a January Bloomberg report. The Information reported that the FTC is taking a close look at Meta’s planned acquisition of Within, the company behind the popular VR fitness game Supernatural. In a new report highlighting Meta’s metaverse-related acquisitions, the Tech Oversight Project, an antitrust advocacy group, claimed that the company was using “its same playbook to squash potential competition,” as it has in the past.
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Meta’s critics are especially skeptical about the company buying up metaverse companies because of its contentious acquisitions in the past, particularly Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC and 48 states and territories sued Facebook over these purchases at the end of 2020, drawing on internal emails showing how Facebook executives allegedly strategized to get rid of the company’s competitors, including Zuckerberg saying that it’s “better to buy than compete.” The states’ case was dismissed (a decision the states are appealing), but the FTC’s is still going. Meta now argues that the government is backtracking and going after deals that it approved years ago.
Antitrust regulators argue that Meta is an unbeatable social media behemoth, but in recent weeks, Meta has suffered a series of setbacks that might make it harder for that argument to stand. After a fourth-quarter earnings report showed shrinking user growth on the Facebook app, Meta’s stock price took a historic dip, losing more than $250 billion in market value in a day, the largest ever single-day drop for a US company. Executives blamed the bad news, in part, on competition from TikTok, which is popular with younger users Facebook is struggling to attract.
That Meta is losing relevance in the social media market is a very real threat for the company. It’s also why, even though the technology is still largely hypothetical, the potential regulation of the metaverse — not social media regulation — could become the more worrisome long-term threat for Meta, one that could slow down the company at a time when it needs to reinvent itself to succeed.
For users, the debate is also about who will control the metaverse. Many leading technologists say the rise of the metaverse is akin to the invention of the mobile web or the internet itself. And if this new alternate reality really is this powerful, then whoever controls it — whether that’s Meta, a handful of other Big Tech companies, or smaller companies — could become the tech giants of the future.
“Without the ability for other companies to compete with Facebook and their money, then you’re really only giving Facebook the opportunity to create for VR,” said Stephanie Llamas, founder of the metaverse market research firm VoxPop. “And that means we might be missing out on really cool stuff.”
We don’t know yet if Facebook will establish a monopoly in the metaverse because the metaverse doesn’t fully exist. The AR/VR ecosystem that exists today is just one part of what Zuckerberg and other business leaders see as a whole host of new technologies that will ultimately support the metaverse — or many metaverses. Apple and Google are reportedly working on headsets that could compete with the Meta Quest, while other major players like Microsoft and Sony are expanding their existing AR/VR product lines. Microsoft, for one, recently spent nearly $70 billion acquiring Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest gaming companies in the world, a deal that could have major implications for the development of the metaverse.
“Investing in and building products that consumers want is the key to success,” said Meta company spokesperson Christopher Sgro. “We cannot build the metaverse alone — collaboration with developers, creators, and experts will be critical. As we invest in the metaverse, we know that we face fierce competition from companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Snap, Sony, Roblox, Epic, and many others at every step of this journey.”
Some people in Washington want to take action before Meta has the chance to corner an emerging market once again. That may require changing existing antitrust laws, which critics say are too narrow. Antitrust regulations have also historically relied on the cost of goods to consumers and don’t take into account the modern digital economy, where services like Facebook and Instagram are free. Whatever regulators and lawmakers decide to do with Meta will have reverberations throughout Silicon Valley and might define the fight to break up Big Tech.
Some competitors are already complaining that Meta isn’t playing fair in the new metaverse market. Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants the metaverse to allow other companies to build in this space. But some independent developers argue that Meta isn’t as open as it says it is.
One big issue: Some AR/VR hardware companies say Meta is discounting its VR headsets to the point that it’s hard for smaller startups to compete. Meta’s Quest 2 headset currently costs $299, which is several hundred dollars below any comparable device on the market. The FTC is reportedly looking into the possibility that Meta is selling Quest headsets at a loss in an attempt to undercut competitors and drive them out of the market, a practice known as predatory pricing.
“No one can put a product on the market at the price they’re at today, with the same kind of capabilities,” Stan Larroque, founder of the Paris-based AR/VR startup Lynx, told Recode. The company plans to release its first consumer headset, which Larroque says will have more advanced features than the Quest 2, for $700. “My name is not Mark Zuckerberg. I cannot sell my product at a loss.”
Larroque added that Meta has tried to poach his team of engineers with offers of higher salaries, but his staff stayed on. Larroque also said he’s spoken with various regulatory agencies and lawmakers in the US and Europe about Meta’s business practices. Meta declined to comment on Larroque’s claims.
But Meta’s lower price for its headsets is not necessarily an antitrust violation. Predatory pricing cases are very difficult to prove. The current law says below-cost pricing is only illegal if it’s done by a dominant company in order to run competitors out of business, allowing it to raise its prices above market levels to recoup its losses once it has a monopoly. Courts generally see low prices as good for consumers, even if they come at the expense of competitors.
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Another topic that’s come under scrutiny is whether Meta’s metaverse is truly open to third-party software developers. Currently, Meta operates an AR/VR app store — similar to Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store — for which developers can create software for its headset. Meta, like Apple and Google, takes a 30 percent cut of any purchases made in the apps. Meta has also required users to sign in with Facebook accounts, a requirement that’s raised concerns about the company creating a walled garden. (Following an outcry from many gamers, Meta said it plans to end the Facebook account requirement.)
Developers have raised other concerns about how Meta operates its app store. Some have accused the company of blocking rival apps from being carried on Meta’s Quest AR/VR app store, or of copying the competition outright. For example, Meta’s Horizon Worlds social space is similar to the popular game Rec Room, and the company’s “Horizon Workrooms” virtual work conferencing software looks a lot like a collaboration app from a company called Spatial. (Spatial has since pivoted to NFTs rather than VR; the company’s head of growth Jacob Loewenstein told Recode that the reason for the pivot wasn’t because Meta copied Spatial but because of growing business opportunities around NFTs, artists, and creators.)
Meta has also acquired some of the most popular third-party games for the Quest headset, including not only Supernatural but also Beat Saber, which is one of the most popular games in VR and currently listed among top-selling games in Meta Quest’s app store.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of developers who feel they don’t even have a chance to enter the market because Facebook is buying up the technology that they’re trying to develop,” Llamas, from VoxPop, said. On the other hand, Meta’s AR/VR can be beneficial for the industry since the company can pour resources into developing startups and hardware to scale to a wider audience, she added.
In response to concerns about whether its AR/VR platform is truly open to third-party developers, Meta pointed to the fact that the company still allows the games it has acquired to run on third-party gaming systems.
As AR/VR becomes a more mainstream technology — and as Quest headsets capture a larger share of the market — whether or not Meta is giving its own products an advantage will become a higher stakes battle.
The metaverse is still very much part of a hypothetical future, which makes accusations that Meta is monopolizing it now tough to prove. And while Meta has had issues with the FTC in the past — including a record $5 billion fine over Facebook privacy violations a few years ago — the agency allowed it to acquire the companies that helped it become the dominant force it still is today. The FTC is reconsidering that now.
In their lawsuits against Meta, the FTC and attorneys general argued that the company’s acquisitions and anti-competitive practices helped it dominate social media and protected it from competition in up-and- coming spaces like mobile and messaging, which it was unable to do on its own. Other companies found their access to Facebook’s platform restricted or limited if they worked with competitors or were competitors themselves.
The FTC is now asking for the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp — along with any other asset that is found to illegally harm competition — to be undone. This would effectively break up the company now known as Meta.
Meta says the FTC hasn’t proved that Meta has a social media monopoly. Meta Vice President and General Counsel Jennifer Newstead said that the FTC “cleared these acquisitions years ago,” and that the government “now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final.” Meta has scored one victory in the case, when a judge threw out the states’ lawsuit and said the FTC needed to make a better case that Meta had a social media monopoly. The FTC refiled a longer, more detailed complaint that so far has been allowed to move forward over Meta’s objections.
Meanwhile, other parts of the world may have lost some of their appetite for Meta mergers. The company’s attempt to buy Giphy, a generator and database of GIFs, is being fought by antitrust regulators in the United Kingdom, which fined the company millions of dollars and ordered it to sell Giphy off (Meta has appealed, and the acquisition is on hold until it’s resolved). But after more than a year of scrutiny, Meta’s $1 billion acquisition of customer service software company Kustomer finally went through after Meta secured approval from regulators in the UK, US, and EU, so not every Meta merger is being blocked.
In any case, Meta maintains that it has plenty of competitors, an argument that may be helped by its recent quarterly earnings.
“If Facebook is losing market power, that would be relevant to the FTC’s lawsuit,” Rutgers Law professor Michael Carrier said. “The suit challenges Facebook’s conduct not just at the time of the acquisitions but also continuing to the present.”
The history of antitrust cases against big, disruptive technology companies shows that the government doesn’t have to win to have an impact. The DOJ sued IBM and Microsoft for monopolizing the mainframe and operating system markets, respectively. Those cases ended up being dropped or settled, but miring the companies in years of litigation during technological shifts allowed for competitors to emerge.
The IBM and Microsoft cases show how antitrust action can distract or discourage tech companies from new markets; in those cases, personal computing and the mobile internet, respectively. It’s still too early to say if Meta will be similarly impacted.
The cases also show the gap between the fast-moving technology industry and the government’s response, which is notoriously slow. It can take decades for antitrust cases to be resolved. Attempts to reform legislation can take even longer.
“There’s a real problem in Washington where we’re always fighting the fight from five years ago, or sometimes we’re fighting the fight from 10 years ago. And it makes it really difficult to ever get ahead of things,” Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at Public Knowledge, said.
The FTC isn’t ignoring the metaverse, either. When the agency re-filed its complaint against Meta last year, it included a new section about the metaverse. The agency noted that Meta’s pattern of cutting off access to its platform for developers who work with competitors, or whose apps directly compete with Meta’s services, is “likely” to occur whenever the company faces competition from new technologies. The metaverse was cited as an example of one of those new technologies.
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
That doesn’t mean the agency can do something about Meta and its metaverse ambitions anytime soon. Antitrust cases are tough enough to prove in established markets, let alone emerging ones. But that may be a fight the FTC or the DOJ’s antitrust division — which was reportedly looking into Facebook’s VR acquisitions back in 2020 — wants to take on, now that both are led by vocal critics of Big Tech’s power over the economy.
“The argument that the VR market is too new [or] unknown could have worked a few years ago, but today, it could provide an enticing test case for agencies intent on showing that they will vigorously enforce the antitrust laws against ‘nascent competitors,’” Carrier explained.
The FTC may get some help from lawmakers. Bipartisan antitrust bills specifically targeted at Big Tech companies and digital platforms are making their way through Congress. One bill, the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, would forbid dominant companies from acquiring competitors — or potential competitors — in order to reinforce their monopoly power. If it passes, Meta may not be able to continue to make acquisitions in certain markets, including the metaverse, according to Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute of Local Self-Reliance.
But the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act seems to have stalled in Congress, which has yet to give any of the Big Tech antitrust bills a floor vote in either house. The bill’s Senate co-sponsors, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tom Cotton, didn’t comment to Recode on its progress. Advocates have become increasingly worried at how little time is left in this session.
In the meantime, the FTC and the DOJ are currently working on new merger guidelines that the agencies said will better address modern markets and what they will consider when deciding whether to approve mergers. But it will be at least a year before those guidelines are complete.
There are other hurdles when it comes to regulators’ plans to rein in Meta. Without increased funding from Congress, the FTC has limited resources and has to pick its battles, especially when it comes to fighting massive companies, including the other Big Tech companies, that can afford an army of lawyers to fight back. FTC chair Lina Khan may decide an emerging market like AR/VR isn’t the hill she wants to die on.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about how exactly the metaverse will shake out. It’s possible that Meta’s plans may fail not just due to regulation, but business realities.
Putting aside the debate about competing tech giants in the metaverse, the masses may not want to engage with this alternate reality at all. Zuckerberg’s announcements about the metaverse have been met with a good deal of confusion and skepticism. And let’s not forget that, a decade ago, Google Glass — that company’s early attempt at an augmented reality headset — notoriously flopped because it just wasn’t popular with everyday users, many of whom found it privacy-invasive and uncool. Only about a quarter of Americans have ever used an AR or VR headset, and just 28 percent say they’re excited by the technology, according to a July Morning Brew-Harris poll.
And let’s not forget Meta’s history of privacy problems and content moderation issues that have contributed to users losing trust in the company. That means people might be reluctant to give Meta more access to even more personal data that AR/VR headsets can collect, like our eye movements and facial expressions.
Regardless of how successful or not Meta’s business plans in the metaverse are, having the looming threat of regulation hanging over its head isn’t helping. Regulation could slow Meta during a critical moment for the company when it needs to reinvent itself. What’s clear is that no matter what happens, regulators are trying to get ahead of the metaverse, and Meta won’t be able to skate by as easily as it has in the past.
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Well, it was an immediate hit.
They took to one another and after dating for six weeks, he asked her to join him for a weekend in Spain.
Their first night there, she undressed as he did.
There she stood nude, except for a pair of black panties, he in his birthday suit.
Looking her over, he asked, “Why the black panties?”
She replied “My breasts you can fondle, my body is yours to explore, but down there I am still mourning.”
He knew he was not going to get lucky that night.
The following night was the same, she stood there wearing the black panties and he was in his birthday suit but now he was wearing a black condom.
She looked at him and asked, “What’s with the black condom?”
He replied, "I want to offer my deepest condolences.
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Last anniversary, I decided to change this bad habit and make my wife happy.
For a week, I was diligent, always capping the toothpaste. I was expecting my wife to thank me, but she never did it.
Finally last night, she turned and looked at me and said - “why have you stopped brushing your teeth?”
Marriage is a difficult relationship I tell you.
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All i can do is a low ha.
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….or does it take time to develop ?
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The bike looked better than a new one, even though it was 10 years old. It was shiny and in great condition.
He buys it and asks the seller how he kept it in such great condition for 10 years.
‘Well, it’s quite simple,’ says the seller, ’whenever the bike is outside and it’s gonna rain, rub Vaseline on the chrome as it protects it from the rain, and he hands Joe a jar of Vaseline.
That night, his girlfriend, Sandra, invites him over to meet her parents and naturally, they ride the bike there. Just before they enter the house, Sandra stops him and says, ‘I have to tell you something about my family.’
‘When we eat dinner, we don’t talk. In fact, the FIRST person who says anything during dinner has to do the dishes.’
‘No problem,’ He says, and in they go.
Joe is shocked.Right in the middle of the living room is a huge stack of dirty dishes. In the kitchen is another huge stack of dishes. Piled up on the stairs, in the corridor, everywhere he looks dirty dishes. They sit down to dinner, and sure enough, no one says a word.
As dinner progresses, Joe decides to take advantage of the situation. He leans over and kisses Sandra. No one says a word. He reaches over and fondles her breasts. Nobody says a word. So he stands up, grabs her, rips her clothes off, throws her on the table and screws her, right there in front of her parents. His girlfriend is a little flustered, her dad is obviously livid and her mom horrified when he sits back down, but no one says a word.
He looks at her mom. She’s got a great body too. Joe grabs mom, bends her over the table, pulls down her panties, and screws her every which way but loose right there on the dinner table. She has a big orgasm and Joe sits down. His girlfriend is furious, her dad is boiling and mom is beaming from ear to ear, but still … . Total silence.
All of a sudden there is a loud clap of thunder and it starts to rain. Joe remembers his bike so he pulls the jar of Vaseline from his pocket, but as he stands up the father immediately shouts: ‘Ok, ok, I’ll go do the fuckin’ dishes!!’
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