Washington – The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, emphasized on Wednesday in a federal court that bought Instagram and WhatsApp because he saw value in companies, not to get the competitors, as the Federal Commerce Commission alleges in a historic antitrust test.
Zuckerberg took the position for the third day at the trial, ending his testimony as a first witness on Wednesday afternoon. He took questions of the goal lawyer Mark Hansen, who argued that his client barely has the monopoly on social networks, as the FTC states, and still faces a hard global competition.
Hansen focused part of his questions on the emails sent by Zuckerberg and his associates that the FTC cited in previous testimony to illustrate the alarm of the Facebook founder about the growth of Instagram and his feeling that he needed to neutralize his threat.
Zuckerberg said he is very focused on inventing new things, and understanding what other people are creating is a large part of the process. At any given time in the history of his company, he said, you can find similar concern tones in emails about what other companies were doing better than yours.
“This is my job,” said Zuckerberg. “I need to understand what is happening, and I need to press our teams to move quickly” to learn what is happening in a very competitive market.
Hansen questioned Zuckerberg about competition, particularly Tiktok, the popular social media site owned by the company based in Beijing Bytedonce, and the growth of the YouTube video exchange platform, owned by Alphabet.
Zuckerberg testified that people spend more time on YouTube than on Facebook and Combined Instagram.
While Hansen said that the FTC does not consider that YouTube is a competitor goal, because it does not have the same technology to exchange friends as Facebook, Zuckerberg said that YouTube has incorporated ways of sharing videos.
The FTC argues that Meta has used a monopoly in its technology that facilitates the connection with friends and family to generate huge profits as consumer satisfaction has decreased. The case could force the technological giant to break Instagram and WhatsApp, the startups that it bought more than a decade ago that since then have become powers in social networks.
Daniel Matheson, the FTC lawyer who questioned Zuckerberg, has repeatedly expressed his own words in the emails to the associates before and after the acquisition of Instagram to try to show that Zuckerberg was more interested in stopping the alarming instagram growth than improving the product.
Under interrogation for Hansen, Zuckerberg insisted that he had no intention of acquiring Instagram just to stop his development and put an end to a threat. He said the approach was to “have it as an independent brand.”
Hansen said the FTC is making similar statements about the acquisition of WhatsApp messaging application: that Zuckerberg was afraid of the company’s potential.
“It’s something I thought about,” said Zuckerberg, pointing out the formidable capabilities of the application, but added that he later learned not to be worried because the owners did not share the same vision or direction.
He said his interest in buying it was “the use of it.”
“I thought the application was important and valuable,” said Zuckerberg.
The test, which is scheduled for recent weeks, will have other large -technology figures. After Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, former Facebook Operations Director, took the stand.
The trial is one of the first evidence of the FTC’s ability of President Donald Trump to challenge the great technology. The lawsuit was filed against goal, then called Facebook, in 2020, during Trump’s first mandate. He states that the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush the competition and establish an illegal monopoly in the social media market.
Facebook bought Instagram, which was an application to share photos without ads, for $ 1 billion in 2012.
Instagram was the first company that Facebook bought and continued to function as a separate application. Until then, Facebook was known for the smallest “acquired boys”: a popular Silicon Valley agreement in which a company buys a startup as a way to hire its talented workers, then closes the acquired company. Two years later, he did it again with the WhatsApp messaging application, which he bought for $ 22 billion.
WhatsApp and Instagram helped Facebook move their desktop computer business to mobile devices, and to remain popular among younger generations as rivals like Snapchat (which also tried, but failed, to buy) and Tiktok emerged.
American district judge James Boasberg chairs the case. At the end of last year, he denied the request for the goal of a summary trial and ruled that the case must go to trial.
