“Your honor, FTC called Mark Zuckerberg.”
Developed by two bodyguards, the CEO of Meta has fully stepped into Washington, DC Court Room. Despite his last efforts to avoid a trial, he was there, the jaw was there to defend his company by breaking the US government.
Immediately after taking the oath, Daniel Mathews, the Federal Trade Commission’s lead attorney for this case, asked Zuckerberg to reflect the Facebook under -dug time.
“In the distant concern, you are glad you didn’t sell MySpace?” Matheman asked.
“Yes,” Zuckerberg replied.
After questioning the next several hours, Matheman walked down the memory lane below Zuckerberg in 2012, before the Facebook Instagram acquisition of $ 1 billion, which FTC claims were the first in a series of anti -competitive measures that shut down other companies. In a case that was initially filed five years ago and the trial was tried this week, the agency argues that Meta should be forced to rotate both Instagram and WhatsApp, which it later acquired for about $ 19 billion in 2014.
While on the stand, Zuckerberg was slowly looking back when he mentioned the big moments of Facebook’s early history, from the launch of the news feed to the company’s rocky transfer in 2012. It was only time to ask about the founding mission to connect Facebook friends and family, and the initial rivals challenged the matter. When asked to confirm that he had been a “single decision maker” of Meta and controls the shareholders since 2006, he shook his head twice quickly and said, “Yes.”
Although the line of Matheman’s questions sometimes seems to be nervous, it seemed to be at least partially providing a historic context for Chief Judge James Bosburg, who had previously acknowledged during the trial that he never used a meta service. (On one occasion, Boseburg asked the Meta CEO for a crash course what does “ancestral code” mean. Zuckerberg bindingly.)
After the day, the FTC began working to achieve Instagram. Matheman showed internal emails in which Zuckerberg warned colleagues that the early rise of Instagram was “really scary” for Facebook. In other emails, he complained about his Facebook photo app, the slow pace of Facebook camera development and described the team members as “checkout”.
Zuckerberg wrote in another internal email shown to the court, “Instagram needs to be combined so fast.” In a separate exchange with an engineering executive working on the Facebook camera, Zuckerberg tried to create a sense of urgency: “If Instagram keeps on hitting a mobile or if Google buys them, in the next few years, they can easily add pieces of their service that we are doing now.”
In court, Zuckerberg threatened Instagram on Facebook at that time. In response to Matheman, he asked if both apps were competing to connect friends with each other. “Was this the most important thing that was going on? I don’t remember.”
The FTC case depends on the argument that Meta’s “personal social networking services” has a monopoly in the United States, a market containing only Snap Chat and Meway, which are self -stated. “The first social media network of privacy“This claims “More than 20 million users worldwide.” By adding these two services, the FTC claims that about 80 80 % of active consumers in the meta market own.
During the opening arguments of the Meta, the company’s central lawyer Mark Hanson argued that the FTC market appreciation is artificially tight -lipped, excluding tricktok, Issez and other services. He called the matter “a grip of FTC ideas in the fight with the facts and in the fight with the law.”
A joint strategy in cases of distrust is that the company should reduce its influence to show less monopoly. In Meta’s view, the market is much wider than the definition of the FTC for consumer attention. Hanson presented an internal metal data, explaining how Facebook and Instagram used in the United States earlier this year, when Techtok was briefly offline. And when Facebook was closed around the world in 2021, it presented data, which suggests that YouTube use has increased far more than snap chat.
Even if it can prove that Meta has the power of monopoly in the relevant market, the FTC will have to show in the coming weeks that the company has worked illegally to achieve or maintain its dominant position.
Re -listening to Meta, The Company has seen opportunities where it can invest and invest new products in large -scale apps so far used worldwide. But the FTC is of the view that, as Zuckerberg’s own refusal to sell MySpace, Instagram and WhatsApp, would be as well as his own refusal.
At the end of the day, since the FTC’s Mathanian was still quizing Zuckerberg about his intentions behind buying Instagram, Judge Bosberg asked to end the testimony. When Zuckerberg retired from the Witness Stand, one of his security guards encouraged him to leave the room.
