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Mark Zuckerberg leaves court on Monday
Meta Boss Mark Zuckerberg took the position of the witness in a historic antitrust trial to defend her business against allegations that her business operates a social media monopoly.
His testimony is part of a case filed for the first time by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2020 during the last days of the first Trump administration.
The United States surveillance dog alleges that the meta unfairly dominated the market thanks to its acquisitions of the Instagram photo sharing application in 2012 and at the WhatsApp messaging service in 2014.
The FTC seeks to break Meta by forcing a fallout of Instagram or WhatsApp. Meta says there is a lot of competition in social media, including applications such as Tiktok, X and Youtube.
Wearing a dark suit and a light blue tie, Mr. Zuckerberg was the first witness to the case on Monday before a Washington DC Federal Court. The trial should last two months.
The FTC underlined a 2011 email, Mr. Zuckerberg, sent by saying: “Instagram seems to develop rapidly.”
The following year, he sent another email saying that the company was “so far behind that we do not even understand how far we are … I fear that it will take us too much time to make up for their delay”.
On the stand, Mr. Zuckerberg defended his statements, calling “relatively early” emails on the purchase of the application. He added that Meta had improved Instagram over the years.
Reuters
The trial could last until July
Mr. Zuckerberg also said that he wanted to buy Instagram because of his camera technology, not because of his social network. He should continue his testimony on Tuesday.
The FTC claims that the company paid overweight when it has acquired Instagram for $ 1 billion and WhatsApp for $ 19 billion as a defensive move.
“They decided that competition was too difficult and it would be easier to buy their rivals than to compete with them,” said FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson, in his declaration of opening during the trial on Monday.
Meta replied that the FTC trial, which initially examined and approved the two acquisitions, was “wrong”.
Meta “acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to improve and develop them alongside Facebook,” said the lawyer for the company Mark Hansen.
The FTC lawyer cited a 2012 memo by Mr. Zuckerberg in which he discusses the importance of the “neutralizing” Instagram.
Mr. Matheson called this message “a smoking pistol”.
Meta, on the other hand, said that purchases has improved consumer experience.
“The acquisitions to improve and grow” have never been deemed illegal, said Meta’s principal litigant on Monday, “and they should not be judged illegal here”.
Meta said last year that it had 3.27 billion active users per day on its products.
Instagram was to represent more than half of Meta’s advertising revenues in the United States in 2025. According to the Emarketer research firm.
Meta has made regular openings in Trump from her elections.
The company contributed $ 1 million to the Trump inaugural fund and added the former advisor Trump Dina Powell McCormick and the boss of the UFC UFC championship (UFC), Dana White, an ally of Trump, with the Meta board of directors this year.
The company also announced in January that it made the content moderation policies retreat which, according to the Republicans, were equivalent to censorship.
He also agreed to pay $ 25 million in Trump to pay a continuation of his accounts after the riot of the American Capitol in 2021.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also visited the White House in recent weeks.
The Meta Boss put pressure on Trump in person so that the FTC abandons the case, according to the Wall Street Journal.
When asked by the BBC to confirm this report, Meta circumvented the question but said in a statement: “FTC prosecution against Meta defies reality.”
FTC V Meta begins like another major antitrust case – USA V Google – clings.
The Ministry of Justice won the first phase of this case last summer when Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google has a monopoly in online research, with a market share of around 90%.
Last month, lawyers reiterated a request in the Biden administration that a court broke the Google research monopoly.
The case of the FTC against Meta will be more difficult to prove, explains Laura Phillips-Sawyer, associate professor of business law at the University of Georgia.
“I think they have a real difficult battle,” said Ms. Phillips-Sawyer about the FTC.
“They have a long road before any consideration of disinvestment of Instagram or WhatsApp is considered.”
Indeed, in relation to online research, there is more competition in the space of personal network services in which META operates, said Ms. Phillips-Sawyer.
Amazon and Apple also face antitrust by American executors.
