“Your honor, invites FTC Mark Zuckerberg.”
Surrounded by two personal guards, the CEO of Meta in a courtroom in Washington, DC. Despite his recent efforts to avoid the trial, there was, there was a jaw, to defend his company from the disintegration of the American government.
Soon after the oath, the lawyer for the Federal Trade Committee, Daniel Matthekeon, asked Zuckerberg to think again when Facebook was weak.
“It is too late, you are happy because you did not sell to myspace?” Mathson asked.
“Yes,” Zuckerberg answered.
Over the next few hours of interrogation, Matheson Zuckerberg walked below the memory lane until the period before the Facebook acquisition of Instagram on Instagram in 2012, which the first federal trade committee is called in a series of anti -competition steps that closed other companies. In a lawsuit filed initially five years ago and went to trial this week, the agency argues that Meta must be forced to rotate Instagram and WhatsApp, which she later obtained for $ 19 billion in 2014.
While he was on the platform, Zuckerberg seemed to relax slowly as he narrated major moments of early Facebook history, from launching news to the company’s rock transmission to mobile phones in 2012. I spent a great time asking about the founding Facebook and family linking, and the challenge of the first competitors such as Path and Google Plus in the case of use. When he was asked to confirm that he was the “only decision maker” for Meta and controlling the shareholder since 2006, he quickly nodded twice and said: “Yes.”
Although Matthesson’s interrogation line sometimes felt monotonous, it seemed at least partially aimed at providing a historical context for Judges James Boasberg, who admitted during the trial before the trial that he had never used the definition service. (At one point, Meta CEO Boasberg asked for a collision course on what the “original code” means.
Later in the day, FTC started obtaining the Instagram acquisition. Matheson has shown internal email messages that Zuckerberg warned of colleagues that the early Instagram height is “really scary” on Facebook. In other email messages, he complained about the slow development of the photo application on Facebook, a Facebook camera, and the team members described it as “verified”.
“We really need to collect our work quickly on this since Instagram grows very quickly,” Zuckerberg wrote in another internal email that appears before the court. In a separate exchange with an engineering executive official working on a Facebook camera, Zuckerberg tried to instill a sense of urgency: “If Instagram continues to kick the ass on the mobile phone or if Google buys it, they can over the next few years add pieces of their service easily what we are now copying now.”
In court, Zuckerberg reduced the Instagram threat that was put on Facebook at the time. “Yes, of course,” he said in response to Mathson asking whether both applications are competing to deliver friends to each other. “Was this the main thing that was happening? Not to remember.”
The FTC case depends on the argument that Meta has a monopoly in the United States about “personal social media services”, a market that the agency only says that includes Snapchat and MEWE, which is self -described. “The first social media network for privacy“This claims it “More than 20 million users worldwide.” By including these two services, FTC claims that Meta has approximately 80 percent of the market’s active users.
During the opening arguments of Meta, the main lawyer of the company, Mark Hansen, argued that the definition of the FTC market is artificially narrow by excluding Tiktok, IMessage and other services. The case called “the FTC’s theories in a state of war with facts and in war with the law.”
One of the common strategy in anti -monopoly cases is to reduce its effect to look less monopolistic. From Meta’s point of view, the user interest market is much broader than the FTC definition. Hansen provided internal identification data that shows how Facebook and Instagram’s use increased when Tiktok was briefly connected to the United States earlier this year. When Facebook had a break all over the world in 2021, he provided data showing that the use of YouTube was much more than Snapchat.
Even if it can prove that Meta has a monopolistic force in a relevant market, FTC will also have to appear in the coming weeks that the company has acted illegally to achieve or maintain its dominant position.
To hear Meta Rity It, the company has seen opportunities as it can invest and develop emerging products in aircraft applications now used all over the world. But FTC argues that, such as the early Zuckerberg refusal for sale to Myspace, Instagram, and WhatsApp was fine on their own.
At the end of the day, where Matheson of FTC was still interrogating Zuckerberg from his intention to buy Instagram, Judge Boasberg requested the end of the certificate. When Zuckerberg stepped out of the witness platform, a security guards made them asked to leave the room before everyone started to apply – another attempt by the executive director of progress in the battle.
