Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, took the testimony on Monday to defend the social media empire into an antitrust test that could disassemble a company that has transformed the way people are connected to the internet.
In a full court in the US District Court for the Columbia District, the lawyers of the Federal Trade Committee presented Mr Zuckerberg with a connecting material full of emails and internal communications on his acquisition strategy, pushing him to defend his words. The government argued that Meta illegally stinging a social media monopoly, acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp when they were tiny startups, combining them in the same company, which was then known as Facebook.
“I think all this is relatively early thought,” Mr Zuckerberg said of an email that wrote in February 2012 in which he discussed Instagram preservation, but does not add more features. “In practice, we ended up investing a ton after we got it.”
Mr Zuckerberg, who is expected to repeat the testimony on Tuesday, was the first witness in the trial, the Meta Platforms Federal Trade Committee. Earlier on the day, FTC opened its first antitrust trial under Trump’s administration claiming that Meta’s acquisitions were part of a “buy-or-bury strategy”. Eventually, the markets gathered the power of Meta, depriving consumers of other social networking options and eliminating competition, the government said.
Meta’s lawyers have denied allegations for opening statements, offsetting that the company is facing a lot of competition from Tiktok and other social media platforms. The FTC adopted the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp more than a decade ago and trying to relax the mergers would give a dangerous previous one, the lawyers added.
The trial is the most consequent threat to the business empire of Mr Zuckerberg, co -founder of the company. If the government succeeds, the FTC is likely to ask Meta to assign Instagram and Whatsapp, it may shift how Silicon Valley makes businesses and changes a long model in which large technologies have broken the younger opponents.
Still, legal experts warned that it may be difficult for FTC to win. This is because the government must prove something unknown: that Meta would not have achieved the same success without acquisitions. It is also extremely rare to try to relax the mergers approved years ago, legal experts said.
“One of the most difficult things to deal with laws on antitrust laws is when industry leaders buy small potential competitors,” said Gene Kimmelman, a senior official at the Obama government ministry. Meta “bought many things that either did not fall or were incorporated,” he added. “How are Instagram and WhatsApp?
Efforts continue a year of bilateral pursuit to limit the enormous power of a handful of technology companies over trade, the exchange of ideas, entertainment and political discourse. Despite the efforts of technology executives to the president of the Trump Court, his antitrust appointed to continue to continue.
FTC’s case against Meta is the third major antitrust treatment to be tried in the last two years. Last year, the Ministry of Justice won the antitrust law against Google for monopoly internet search. A federal judge is going to hear arguments about corrective measures, including a possible disintegration, next week. The department also completed a separate trial against Google for monopoly advertising technology, which is still deciding by a federal judge.
The Justice Ministry has also sued Apple and FTC has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, accusing companies of antitrust violations.
The case against Meta could affect 3.5 billion users, who are on average connected to Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp many times a day for news, shopping and text messages. Instagram and Whatsapp have attracted more users in recent years, as Meta’s flagship stopped growing.
“For more than 100 years, US public policy has insisted that businesses should compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, head of the FTC in the case in its original observations. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”
“They decided that the competition was very tough and it would be easier to redeem their opponents than to compete with them,” he added.
FTC President Andrew Ferguson was in the courtroom to hear the government’s inaugural statement. Meta’s chief legal employee, Jennifer Newstee and Joel Kaplan, the head of world affairs, also watched. Alex Schultz, head of Meta’s marketing, sat on the judges’ table and will serve as a company executive in trial.
The chairman of the case is James Boasberg, 62, the head of the federal court. It is already in the national spotlight to reject Trump’s management effort to use a strong statute of war to briefly depict Venezuelan immigrants who are considered to be members of a violent road gang.
Judge Boasberg said he was never a user of Meta apps, but is familiar with Facebook Live, which was presented in criminal tests. He took notes, as Mr Matheson explained the government’s definitions of social networking and the methodology for identifying Meta was a monopoly. It was just as focused on the objection of the meta of these definitions.
FTC claimed that Mr Zuckerberg said in 2006 that Facebook was used to connect “real friends”. The organization argued that Meta had a monopoly on social networking since 2011 and that Snapchat was one of the only comparable platforms with Facebook and Instagram.
Mr Zuckerberg described the market for social media so much more than how the government defined it. The connection of friends and family is “one of the basic things” the company does, he said, but Meta also participates in the “general idea of entertainment and learning for the world and find out what’s going on”.
Mark Hansen, head of Meta and a partner of the Kellogg law firm, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, said Meta faced competition from Tiktok, Linkedin, YouTube and other platforms.
Mr Hansen said that more than half of Facebook’s commitment and Instagram concerned videos, which made meta competition with Tiktok, the rapidly growing short-Video application. When Tiktok closed instant in January, Meta saw an increase in Facebook and Instagram, as well as Google’s YouTube, which showed that the company had plenty of competition, he said.
“This case is a FTC predatory bag in war with the event and war by law,” Mr Hansen said. “The facts are going to prove that FTC’s theories are wrong.”
“Meta has no monopoly,” he said.
During what is expected to be an eight -week trial, the government and Meta are expected to report competitive versions of the company’s 20 -year history history.
FTC’s argument depends on section 2 of the 1890 SHERMAN Law Law, which forbids a company from maintaining a monopoly through anti -axes.
The FTC accused Meta of struggling to build an application for mobile and fearing that Instagram would quickly overcome it in popularity. The company paid over overflowing when it bought Instagram in 2012 for $ 1 billion, FTC said.
In 2014, as WhatsApp increased, Meta offered to buy the company for $ 19 billion – also well above its market value, the government said.
In addition to Mr Zuckerberg, said FTC, Sheryl Sandberg, a former CEO of MET, and Kevin Systrom, co -founder of Instagram, will testify this week.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who was wearing a dark suit and blue tie, spoke slowly on the stand, seems to grow more comfortable as he explained the electronic social networks engineers and how his company’s products changed over the years.
FTC underlines a paper test of e -mails between transport executives, along with other evidence, to argue that the company was a monopoly and bought the newly formed businesses because it was threats.
In his initial observations, Mr Matheson mentioned the documents, including what he described as a “firearm” February 2012, in which Mr Zuckerberg discussed Instagram’s rise and the importance of “neutralizing a potential competitor”. In another email, in November 2012 in Ms Sandberg, the chief officer at the time, Mr Zuckerberg wrote: “Messenger does not hit Whatsapp, Instagram was growing so faster than we had to buy for $ 1 billion.”
FTC showed Mr Zuckerberg an email of 2011 in which she wrote: “We really have to take our act together quickly, since Instagram is growing so fast.”
Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company had fallen back on the development of a photo exchange application and felt a “feeling of urgency”.
“I generally have high expectations for all our teams to execute,” said Zuckerberg.
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