ap photo A car passes Facebook’s new Meta logo on a sign at the company headquarters in 2021, in Menlo Park, Calif. Federal regulators and Facebook parent Meta are battling over Meta’s proposed acquisition of virtual-reality company Within Unlimited and its fitness app Supernatural.

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators and Facebook parent Meta are battling over Meta’s proposed acquisition of virtual-reality company Within Unlimited and its fitness app Supernatural.

In a landmark legal challenge to a Big Tech merger, the Federal Trade Commission is suing to block the deal, asserting it would hurt competition and violate antitrust laws.

Meta struck back Thursday, asking a federal court in San Jose, California, to dismiss the FTC’s July request for an injunction against the acquisition.

The tech giant said in its court filing that the government failed to establish that the virtual-reality market is concentrated with high barriers to entry. The claims in the agency’s lawsuit “are nothing more than the FTC’s speculation about what Meta might have done,” the company says. It asserts that the FTC failed to meet two key legal standards set in previous cases.

In a statement Thursday, the FTC noted that it revised its complaint last week in a way that narrowed the focus of its allegations. In its new form, the statement said, “We are confident that the District Court complaint will not be dismissed and this case will be heard.”

Meta, in its own statement, said “The FTC’s attempt to fix its ill-conceived complaint still ignores the facts and the law, and relies on pure speculation of a hypothetical future state.”

It added that it believes the complaint should be dismissed because there is “vibrant competition in the fitness space and across (virtual reality), and our acquisition of Within will be good for people, developers and the VR space.”

The FTC’s vote last summer to seek to block the Within acquisition was 3-2, with Chair Lina Khan and the other two Democratic commissioners approving it and the two Republicans opposed.

The FTC’s original suit named CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant as well as Meta, but he was dropped in August.

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, the FTC noted in its suit. Fueled by the popularity of its top-selling Quest headsets, Meta’s Quest Store has become a leading U.S. app platform with more than 400 apps available to download, according to the agency.

Meta bought seven of the most successful virtual-reality development studios, and now has one of the largest virtual-reality content catalogs in the world, the FTC says. Its acquisition of the Beat Games studio gave Meta control of the popular app Beat Saber.