John Keilman, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The company that makes Roomba robotic vacuums declared bankruptcy Sunday but said its devices will continue to function normally while the company restructures.

Massachusetts-based iRobot has struggled financially for years, beset by foreign competition that made cheaper and, in the opinion of some buyers, technologically superior autonomous vacuums. When a proposed sale to Amazon.com fell through in 2024 because of regulatory concerns, the company’s share price plummeted.

It owes $352 million to Picea, its primary contract manufacturer which operates out of China and Vietnam. Nearly $91 million of that debt is past due, according to iRobot.

Outlining its restructuring plan Sunday, iRobot said that Picea will receive 100% of the equity interest in iRobot, which the company said would allow it to continue operating.

The Federal Trade Commission, headed by Lina Khan, the former FTC commissioner, effectively blocked Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot in 2022. While I’ve expressed that I was generally a fan of Khan’s leadership, her stance toward acquisitions missed the mark. The idea behind blocking this acquisition was to protect consumers, but that was nonsensical, knowing (a) Amazon had no prior business in the robot vacuum market, and (b) iRobot was spiraling toward bankruptcy already thanks to increased competition from Chinese manufacturers. If the government didn’t actively help iRobot, it would have only been a matter of time before it finally kicked the bucket, which is exactly what happened on Sunday.

But the real icing on the cake for the Biden administration is that iRobot sold itself to a Chinese company, the very enemy it sought to destroy. That embodies the very essence of the Biden administration: trying to fix a problem and ending up making it catastrophically worse. For the record, I don’t see a significant problem with the leading robot vacuum maker being Chinese. Roborock makes great products — way better than iRobot — and it has found success in the market. It’s competing fair and square. But from the U.S. government’s perspective, letting the country’s most powerful enemy usurp a growing market for an entirely self-inflicted reason is just embarrassing.

The FTC did drag Meta into court for effectively the same reason (illegal acquisitions), but it did such a terrible job of proving Meta illegally acquired its monopoly — which it definitely did — that it lost the case under the Trump administration earlier this year. That proves sheer incompetence in the FTC: that it’s spending too much time on cases that don’t matter and not enough on the ones that do. The Biden administration had no survival instinct — at some points, it was too reactionary, and in others, it wasn’t reactionary enough. The result is a once-great company falling to a foreign competitor because the U.S. government sealed its fate years ago. I pity iRobot.