In the U.S. antitrust trial, Meta’s Zuckerberg admitted that he bought Instagram because it was “better”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Frank CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a key confession in Tuesday’s U.S. antitrust trial, saying he bought Instagram because it was “better” cameras the company was trying to build for flagship app Facebook at the time.
The acknowledgement appears to reinforce the allegations of U.S. antitrust executors that Mehta used a “buy or bury” strategy to snap up potential competitors, putting smaller competitors in a difficult position and maintaining an illegal monopoly.
This was testified at a high-risk trial in Washington the next day, as the FTC seeks to relax Meta’s acquisition of precious assets Instagram and WhatsApp.
The case, filed during Donald Trump’s first term, is widely seen as a test of the new Trump administration’s commitment to take over big tech companies.
When Zuckerberg was asked by an FTC attorney if the FTC believed that the fast-growing Instagram could damage Meta, then called Facebook, he believed Instagram had better camera products than Facebook built.
Zuckerberg said that in the process of building the camera application, “we are doing the build and purchase analysis.” “I thought Instagram would be better, so I think it would be better to buy them.”
Zuckerberg also admitted that many attempts to build its own app failed.
“It’s hard to build a new application”
“Building a new app is hard, and it’s more than when we try to build a new app, it doesn’t get a lot of attention,” Zuckerberg told the court.
“We may try to build dozens of applications in the company’s history, and most people won’t go anywhere,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s testimony comes from years after Meta’s release of years of release of statements drawn from Facebook’s own documents, such as in an email in 2008 that he said “buying is better than competition.”
The company believes his past intentions are irrelevant because the FTC has already defined the social media market inaccurately and has failed to take into account the fierce competition faced by Bytedance’s Tiktok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Apple’s messaging apps.
The FTC accuses Meta of holding a monopoly on the platform used to share content with friends and family, and its main competitors in the U.S. are Snap’s Snapchat and Mewe, a small, privacy-focused social media app.
The FTC believes that platforms for users to broadcast content based on shared interests (such as X, Tiktok, YouTube and Reddit) are not interchangeable.
(Reported by Jody Godoy in Washington and Katie Paul of New York; Editors of Alexandra Alper and Mark Porter)
