Mark Zuckerberg Meta admitted Tuesday that he bought Instagram because it was “better” than the Facebook camera app – a potentially great admission on the second day of the FTC historic trial to disrupt the social media giant.
Zuckerberg returned to the US District Court in Washington, DC, where the FTC lawyers focused on Zuckerberg’s emails in his Facebook underlines about the 2012 shopping time of Instagram.
When he was printed if he was worried that Instagram raised a threat, Zuckerberg admitted that he felt she had built a better photo app than she had in development.
“Building a new app is difficult,” Zuckerberg said.
“We’ve probably tried to build dozens of applications on the company’s history, and most of them go nowhere.”
Zuckerberg rejected the questions if Meta, then called Facebook, was trying to suppress a competitive threat to his company.
“We were doing a built -in anti -purchase analysis,” Zuckerberg said. “I thought Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
FTC claims that Meta used a “buy or bury” strategy to get key rivals on Instagram and WhatsApp in order to prevent them from challenging her monopoly embedded on social media.
He seeks to force Meta to rotate Instagram, which he earned for $ 1 billion in 2012, and WhatsApp, bought for about $ 19 billion in 2014.
Feds highlighted a 2012 email exchange in which Zuckerberg acknowledged that former cfo David Ebersman that buying Instagram would “effectively neutralize a competitor”.
“One way to see this is that what we are really buying is time,” Zuckerberg added. “Even if some new competitors stem, buying on Instagram, trail, quadrilateral, etc. Now they will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before someone can approach their scale again.”
A special exchange from 2012 showed a frustrated Zuckerberg by pressuring Facebook’s former Facebook chief Sheryl Sandberg for fear that WhatsApp was marking the messenger on Facebook, his conversation service.
“Messenger is not beating exactly whatsApp, Instagram is growing much faster than we had to buy them for $ 1 billion,” Zuckerberg said in Sandberg’s email. “This is not killing exactly.”
FTC also highlighted some harmful e -mail exchanged by Zuckerberg during her opening statement, including a 2012 message, where he admitted that “Instagram can make sense to us” and is “quite threatening for us”.
In another 2008 email that has withdrawn control, Zuckerberg said “you better buy than to compete”.
At the witness’s stand, Zuckerberg tried to postpone back to the FTC assertion that Facebook bought Instagram only because of its growing user base.
“It is not correct to say that the only reason we were interested was the rate or rate of growth,” Zuckerberg said.
“We could have built an app,” he added. “Whether or not it has been a matter of speculation.”
Meta actions were flat in Tuesday’s trade.
FTC case may depend on whether to persuade Judge James Boasberg in the non-Judgment court that their definition of Meta market is correct.
Sandberg is expected to appear in the stand as soon as possible Wednesday. Other future high -profile witnesses include Instagram co -founder Kevin Systrom and current Instagram chief Adam Mosser.
A possible Instagram loss is seen as particularly dangerous for meta because the photo sharing app is more than half of its US -based income.
In his earlier testimony on Monday, Zuckerberg resisted the FTC’s attempt to define meta as the prevailing social media firms built in the division between friends and family.
“The ‘friend’ part has come down enough, but it’s still something we are interested in,” Zuckerberg said.
During her opening statement, FTC argued that the only direct competitors for Meta owned by Facebook and Instagram are Snapchat and a little known app, focused on intimacy called Mewe. Other platforms such as the professionally concentrated video -centered Tiktok and LinkedIn are in distinct categories, by federations.
Meta’s lawyers fired, claiming that FTC was wrong to rule out the fierce competition he faces from Tiktok and YouTube’s likes for the attention of the user.
Zuckerberg went to great lengths to make President Trump comfortably before the trial as he sought to avoid the FTC trial with a solution.
In addition to donating $ 1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and participating in his oath ceremony, Zuckerberg eliminated the control of the facts and programs that the president’s allies have widely criticized.
The billionaire also bought a residence in Washington DC and is reported to have personally visited the White House at least three times since January.
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