The first week of the Meta Antitrust Trial brought new revelations on how the company formerly known as Facebook approached the competitive threat posed by Instagram in the early 2010s.
The American government accuses the meta of violation of competition laws by acquiring companies like Instagram and WhatsApp which threatened the Facebook monopoly. If the lawyers of the Federal Trade American Commission (FTC) succeed, the government could force Meta to break its activities by selling Instagram and WhatsApp.
As part of the trial, the FTC shared convincing evidence to demonstrate that Facebook was very aware of the risk that Instagram has created for its business as the photo sharing application gained popularity. In documents containing internal Facebook emails, Facebook leaders are concerned about Instagram growth and discuss the quantity to be paid for the application, if Facebook had to acquire it.
The company’s leaders also discuss other strategies to limit Instagram’s growth, including copying its functionalities and the publication of a clean application, or the purchase of the application and no longer add new features while working on its own products.
Facebook’s strategy to buy or bury your competitors is exposed in these conversations, according to government arguments. In addition to showing how the company thought about its competitors at the time, the messages indicate the strategies of expectation which allowed Meta to become the giant of social networking that it is today.
Some of the strengths of these messages are below.
Mark Zuckerberg and others are concerned about the rapid growth of Instagram
- “Instagram seems to develop rapidly. In 4 months, they are up to 2 million users and 30,000 daily photos downloads. This is a lot. We have to follow this in close collaboration. In addition, the next big push of Dropbox will be in photo sharing.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2011
- “If Instagram continues to kick the ass on mobile, or if Google buys them, then in the coming years, they could easily add elements of their service that copy what we are doing now, and if they have an increasing number of photos of people, then it’s a real problem for us. No reason to use them. – Mark Zuckerberg, September 2011
- “The photo team is now concentrated almost exclusively on a new mobile photo application while we are looking at the simple Instagram photo sharing application..»- Chris Cox, Product Manager, February 2011
- “One of the trends concerning is that a large number of people use Instagram every day – including everyone ranging from non -technical high school friends to FB employees – and they only download some of their photos to FB. – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
Facebook considers an Instagram acquisition, stopping its development and growth
- “I wonder if we should consider buying Instagram, even if it costs around 500 m. Right now, they seem to have two things that we do not have: a very good camera and a photo sharing network focused on photo. ” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “I think that it is quite possible that our initial thesis is bad and theirs is right – that what people want is more to take the best photos than to put them on FB … We could consider paying a lot of money for that.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “I actually think that there is a serious argument to do to buy path, Pinterest, Instagram, Evernote and who we admire / do really big things at the moment if (1) We can structure it in a way that we keep their products and in progress, but transitions the teams to work on FB proper; (2) We think in depth on our platform. – Samuel W. Lessin (former Facebook vice-president of the product), corresponding to Mark Zuckerberg in February 2012
- “I think what we would do is keep their product on the move and not add more features, and concentrate future development on our products, including the construction of all their camera features in ours. By not killing their products, we prevent everyone from hating ourselves and we make sure not to immediately create a hole on the market so that someone else is filling up, but all the future development would go to our main products. ” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “One way to see this is that what we really buy is time. Even if new competitors spring up (sic), buying Instagram, path, Foursquare, etc. We will now give a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get closer to their scale. ” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
