Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has considered spin-off Instagram in anticipation of a potential anti-trust lawsuit in 2018, documents released at a trial in Washington showed Tuesday.
“Most companies resist disbanding, but the history of a company is actually improving performance after most companies split,” he wrote in an email at the time. He said “there are a small chance” that his company would be forced to spin Instagram and WhatsApp anyway.
Zuckerberg made another important concession at US trial Tuesday. He said he bought Instagram because Facebook had a “better” camera than it was trying to build for the flagship app of the time. In an email, he said that Instagram is a “fast-growing, threatening network.”
The acknowledgements appeared to bolster allegations by US antitrust enforcers that Meta snapped potential rivals, used a “buy or fill” strategy to keep competitors down and maintain illegal monopolies.
It was held in Zuckerberg’s second day testimony at a high stake trial in Washington. The US Federal Trade Commission is trying to cancel the acquisition of the valuable assets Instagram Meta, which was acquired for $1 billion.
The case, filed during Donald Trump’s first term, is widely seen as a test of the new Trump administration’s promise to take on large-scale high-tech companies.
Asked by an FTC lawyer if he considers a fast-growing Instagram to be disruptive for the meta, Zuckerberg, later known as Facebook, said he believes Instagram has better camera products than Facebook is building.
Zuckerberg said that in the process of building the camera app, we were “building and purchasing analysis.” “I thought Instagram was good, so I thought it would be better to buy it.”
Zuckerberg also admitted that many attempts by the company to build their own apps have failed.
“Building a new app is difficult, and in many cases, when you try to build a new app, it doesn’t get a lot of traction,” Zuckerberg told the court. “We’ve probably tried to build dozens of apps in the history of the company, but most of them won’t go anywhere.”
Zuckerberg’s testimony comes as Meta defends the statements plucked from Facebook’s own documents, years after the withdrawal of statements picked from Facebook’s own documents, such as a 2008 email that said “it’s better to buy than competition.”
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The company argues that his past intentions are irrelevant as the FTC inaccurately defines the social media market and that Meta could not explain the fierce competition he faced from bytedance’s Tiktok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Apple’s messaging apps.
The FTC has accused Meta of retaining monopoly on the platform used to share content with friends and family, Snapchat, a privacy-focused social media app in 2016 and Mewe.
Platforms where users broadcast content to strangers based on shared interests such as X, Tiktok, YouTube, Reddit, and more are not interchangeable, the FTC argues.
