“Your honor, the FTC calls Mark Zuckerberg.”
Flanked by two bodyguards, Meta’s CEO solemnly strode right into a Washington, DC courtroom. Regardless of his last-ditch efforts to keep away from a trial, he was there, jaw clenched, to defend his firm from being damaged up by the US authorities.
Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Commerce Fee’s lead lawyer for the case, Daniel Matheson, requested Zuckerberg to replicate again on when Fb was the underdog.
“In hindsight, you’re glad you didn’t promote to MySpace?” Matheson requested.
“Sure,” Zuckerberg responded.
Over the subsequent a number of hours of questioning, Matheson walked Zuckerberg down reminiscence lane to the interval simply earlier than Fb’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012, which the FTC claims was the primary in a sequence of anti-competitive steps that locked out different corporations. In a lawsuit that was initially filed 5 years in the past and went to trial this week, the company argues that Meta needs to be pressured to spin off each Instagram and WhatsApp, which it later acquired for roughly $19 billion in 2014.
Whereas on the stand, Zuckerberg appeared to slowly calm down as he recounted main moments from Fb’s early historical past, from the launch of the Information Feed to the corporate’s rocky transition to cell phones in 2012. Appreciable time was spent asking him about Fb’s founding mission to attach family and friends, and the way early rivals like Path and Google Plus challenged that use case. When requested to substantiate that he has been Meta’s “sole resolution maker” and controlling shareholder since 2006, he rapidly nodded his head twice and mentioned, “Sure.”
Whereas Matheson’s line of questioning at occasions felt monotonous, it appeared no less than partly supposed to offer historic context for Chief Choose James Boasberg, who admitted throughout pre-trial that he’d by no means used a Meta service. (At one level, Boasberg requested the Meta CEO for a crash course on what “native code” meant. Zuckerberg eagerly obliged.)
Later within the day, the FTC began to hone in on the Instagram acquisition. Matheson confirmed inner emails during which Zuckerberg warned colleagues that Instagram’s early rise was “actually scary” for Fb. In different emails, he complained concerning the sluggish tempo of improvement of Fb’s personal images app, Fb Digicam, and described members of the crew as “checked out.”
“We actually must get our act collectively rapidly on this since Instagram’s rising so quick,” Zuckerberg wrote in one other inner e-mail proven to the court docket. In a separate change with an engineering government engaged on Fb Digicam, Zuckerberg tried to instill a way of urgency: “If Instagram continues to kick ass on cell or if Google buys them, then over the subsequent few years they might simply add items of their service that duplicate what we’re doing now.”
In court docket, Zuckerberg downplayed the menace Instagram posed to Fb on the time. “Yeah, after all,” he mentioned in response to Matheson asking if each apps have been competing to attach associates with one another. “Was that the principle factor that was happening? To not my recollection.”
The FTC’s case hinges on the argument that Meta has a monopoly within the US on “private social networking providers,” a market the company says solely consists of Snapchat and MeWe, a self-described “privacy-first social media community” that claims to have “over 20 million customers worldwide.” By together with these two providers, the FTC claims that Meta owns practically 80 p.c of lively customers available in the market.
Throughout Meta’s opening arguments, the corporate’s lead lawyer Mark Hansen argued that the FTC’s market definition is artificially slender by excluding TikTok, iMessage, and different providers. He referred to as the case “a seize bag of FTC theories at battle with the info and at battle with the regulation.”
A typical technique in antitrust instances is for a corporation to decrease its affect to look much less monopolistic. In Meta’s view, the marketplace for person consideration is far broader than the FTC’s definition. Hansen offered inner Meta knowledge exhibiting how Fb and Instagram utilization soared when TikTok was briefly offline within the US earlier this yr. And when Fb had a worldwide outage in 2021, he offered knowledge exhibiting that YouTube’s utilization elevated way over Snapchat’s.
Even when it may show that Meta has monopoly energy in a related market, the FTC can even have to indicate over the approaching weeks that the corporate illegally acted to attain or keep its dominant place.
To listen to Meta retell it, the corporate noticed alternatives the place it might make investments and develop fledgling merchandise into now-massive apps used world wide. However the FTC argues that, like Zuckerberg’s early refusal to promote to MySpace, Instagram and WhatsApp would have been simply wonderful on their very own.
On the finish of the day, because the FTC’s Matheson was nonetheless quizzing Zuckerberg about his intent behind shopping for Instagram, Choose Boasberg requested to finish the testimony. As Zuckerberg stepped down from the witness stand, one in every of his safety guards motioned for them to go away the room earlier than everybody else began submitting out — one other try for the CEO to get forward of the fray.
