The private emails of Mark Zuckerberg on the purchase of Instagram by Facebook more than a decade ago returned to haunt Meta during his historic antitrust trial this week – and the result of the case could finally explain if a judge buy his attempts to explain them, experts said at Post.
The Federal Trade Commission presented a series of explosive private messages, including an exchange of 2012 in which Zuckerberg said that the purchase of Instagram “would neutralize a competitor” – a turn of sentence that the main lawyer of the FTC, Daniel Matheson, labeled a “smoking pistol”.
In another message from 2018, the technology tycoon thought about the question of whether Meta should “consider the extreme stage of turning Instagram” to get ahead of regulators.
“While calls to break large technological companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we are forced to transform Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5 to 10 years,” Zuckerberg said in the 2018 document.
The FTC, which wants to force Meta to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, has argued that Zuckerberg’s emails are proof of the company’s use of a “buy or bury” strategy to crush the applications united before being able to constitute a legitimate threat to its social media empire. Zuckerberg was the first witness called Monday and faced a cricket for three consecutive days.
Zuckerberg’s private emails “represent the strongest part of the government’s case,” according to Rebecca Haw Allensworth, an antitrust law expert and professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
“I think it is a dark cloud that will follow Meta – at least throughout this procedure, which could take several years,” added Allensworth.
Candid messages offer a rare overview behind the mask for a notoriously buttoned zuckerberg – and antitrust experts considered them for a long time as one of the most overwhelming evidence of Meta anti -competitive tactics. As early as 2019, the post reported that the FTC had obtained a “spectacular document” because it had assessed whether to challenge Meta’s acquisitions.
Aside from the questions of Zuckerberg, the emails were strongly presented during the opening argument of the FTC accusing the metal of an illegal monopoly. US judge James Boasberg, from Virginia’s eastern district, will decide on the outcome of the jury -free trial.
The company bought Instagram for $ 1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for around $ 19 billion in 2014.
The FTC showed a 2011 email in which Zuckerberg told a subordinate that Facebook “kicked” by Instagram. Later, in 2012, Zuckerberg feared that “Lnstagram could not hurt us significantly” and was “threatening enough for us”.
“Messenger does not beat Whatsapp, Instagram grew so much faster than we had to buy them for $ 1 billion,” Zuckerberg said in another November 2012 email at the COO of the then, Sheryl Sandberg.
In an email from 2013, Zuckerberg grumbled that he was “disappointed and frustrated” that the co-creator of Snap, Evan Spiegal, had refused an acquisition offer of $ 6 billion.
Other emails have shown that Zuckerberg reflecting on an acquisition of WhatsApp because of the potential risk that rival messaging applications like WeChat based in China “tried to build social networks and replace us”. Other leaders of Private Facebook feared that Google first beats the punch and would buy WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, denied that emails showed an anti -competitive intention and were rather as a sign of his constant paranoia that competitors would beat Facebook. At one point, he described Tiktok’s consideration as a “very urgent” threat to the meta when she gained popularity in 2019.
“What is this quote from Andy Grove?” Only the paranoid survives “,” said Zuckerberg in a reference to the former CEO of Intel. “It’s my job to understand things that are adjacent to us and what’s going on in the industry.”
Referring to his 2018 e-mail on a possible preemptive Instagram spin-off, Zuckerberg said that he should “take into account the direction that politics seemed to go at the time” when his business was facing the pressure on Capitol Hill.
On Instagram himself, Zuckerberg argued that his takeover helped rather than harm his growth, which might never have taken place without the support of Facebook.
The FTC argued that Meta is dominant on a close market for social media companies that are built on links between friends and family, with Snapchat as the only direct competitor. Other applications such as Tiktok focused on video are in separate categories, according to the agency.
The lawyers of Zuckerberg and Meta repelled, insisting that Meta faces fierce competition from Tiktok, YouTube and Imessage of Apple for the attention of users. On the stand, Zuckerberg said Meta has focused less and less on her origins of friends and families over time.
A Meta spokesperson said that the FTC case “ignores reality”.
“More than 10 years after the FTC examined and erased our acquisitions, the action of the commission in this case sends the message that no agreement is never really final,” the spokesman said in a statement. “It is absurd that the FTC tries to break a large American company at the same time as the administration tries to save Tiktok belonging to the Chinese.”
The case will probably be excited about the definition of the Meta market, the judge is more precise.
“The definition of the market and monopoly power problems are enormous and unless the government can succeed, they cannot win,” added Allensworth. “On this front, Zuckerberg has done well painting of his business as being very focused on competition and depicting chaos of innovation and start-ups.”
Despite his refusals, Zuckerberg has taken steps to completely avoid the trial – in particular by making at least three trips to the White House while trying to convince President Trump to settle the case.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg had offered $ 450 million to pay the case – a fraction of the $ 30 billion requested by the president of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson.
“FTC lawyers have done an excellent job by exhibiting the monopoly strategy that the meta has had for years,” said a former FTC official who recently left the agency and asked for anonymity to discuss the case at the post. “These emails indicate a clear intention to buy potential competitors and real internal concerns concerning the legal implications of these anti-competitive decisions.”
The defenders of the Antitrust say that the testimony of Zuckerberg and the emails themselves, in addition to playing a key role in the case of the FTC, will have large repercussions while Meta faces a meticulous examination of the Congress and the federal regulators.
“These emails are proof of smoking firearms that Mark Zuckerberg knowingly swallowed up competitors to stifle threats before their emergence. Meta deserves to launch the book for having violated the law,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the technological surveillance project.
“This trial has already been a discomfort for Meta, and it should not be surprising that Zuckerberg was trying to convince Trump to cancel everything,” added Haworth.
