During the ongoing antitrust trial against Meta, an email revealed that CEO Mark Zuckerberg contemplated separating Instagram from the company in 2018 due to the “non-trivial” risk the government would move to break up his social media empire.
CNBC reports that during the second day of the FTC’s antitrust trial against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, an email from May 2018 showed that the social media kingpin considered spinning off Instagram from the company. The email, presented during Zuckerberg’s second day on the stand, highlights the growing concerns over potential antitrust litigation against Facebook at the time.
In the email, Zuckerberg wrote, “And i’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals. As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway. This is one more factor we should consider.”
The antitrust trial, which began on Monday and is expected to last for weeks, focuses on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion. The FTC alleges that Meta monopolizes the social networking market and argues that the company should not have been allowed to complete these acquisitions. As a potential remedy, the agency is seeking to force Meta to spin Instagram and WhatsApp off as their own companies.
As Breitbart News reported Tuesday, the FTC alleges that the Instagram and WhatsApp purchases were “killer acquisitions:”
The FTC alleges that Meta’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp were “killer acquisitions” designed to eliminate competition and maintain a monopoly in the social media market. Matheson argued that after acquiring Instagram, Meta “fundamentally manipulated the experience” offered by the service to avoid cannibalizing its own more profitable Facebook product, a decision that “offends the policy” of antitrust laws.
The FTC believes that Zuckerberg was specifically seeking to take out rival social media sites focused on connecting with friends and family. Zuckerberg testified that while friends and family are an important component of Facebook, they are not the only focus. He said, “we’ve always been a service that lets you discover and learn about what’s going on in the world.”
Meta, however, disputes the FTC’s allegations, claiming that the regulator mischaracterizes the competitive landscape by failing to acknowledge rivals such as TikTok and Apple’s iMessage, not just other apps like Snapchat. Earlier in the trial, the FTC also presented an email from October 2013, in which Zuckerberg told other Facebook executives that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel had rejected his $6 billion offer to buy Snapchat.
In the 2018 email, Zuckerberg also noted that the company’s “best estimates are that, had Instagram remained independent, it would likely be around the size of Twitter or Snapchat with 300-400 million MAP today, rather than closer to 1 billion.” MAP refers to monthly active people, a metric used to measure user engagement on social media platforms.
In its opening statement, Meta argued, “for every single one of the many activities offered on its apps, Meta faces vigorous competition from acceptable substitutes. And they all compete with one another for time.”
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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