Mark Zuckerberg said Tiktok de Bytedance Ltd. represented a “highly urgent” competitive threat to Meta Platforms Inc. when she appeared for the first time in 2018, as he testified for a third day in the antitrust trial of the Federal Trade Commission.
“We have observed that our growth had slowed down considerably,” while Tiktok gained popularity, Meta director general said on Wednesday. “It was very urgent, it was an absolute priority for the company for several years.”
Zuckerberg has spent seven hours in the last two days to be questioned by a government lawyer, who has pressed him to review the company’s fight – then Facebook Inc. – to follow the mobile application boom during the previous decade. This led to the purchase of the company Instagram And WhatsApp more than 10 years ago and, in response to Tiktok, the product of his Reels video product for Instagram in 2020.
The FTC wants to force Meta to sell applications while trying to paint Zuckerberg as a clever frame that illegally monopolized part of the social media market by buying businesses rather than competing with them. Responding to Meta’s lawyer Mark Hansen, he can tell his story without hindsight.
“People will share new five -year ways that what’s going on today,” said Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg said Meta competes with a range of platforms, including Google YouTubeAnd Apple Imessage of Inc. as well as Elon Musk XTelegram, Microsoft Body Liendin and others. The FTC maintains that on the close market of information sharing with friends and family, Meta only contributes the Snap Inc. Snapchat.
“Network effects”
Part of the case of the FTC implies the technical concept of “network effects”, which means that the more user companies such as Meta have, the more they are likely to keep a dominant position, because it is unlikely that people pass to a service used by a few people.
American district judge James Boasberg, who chairs the trial without jury in Washington, remained largely silent during interrogation, but intervened during the testimony of Zuckerberg on Wednesday to ask if the effects of the network still count.
“How important is it if your friends are on a particular platform if you can send content from this platform?” Why is it important if your friends are there? ” The judge said.
Zuckerberg said no. “These applications are now used mainly as discovery engines,” he said. “People can take this content in messaging engines.”
If the FTC prevails, a spin-off of Instagram and WhatsApp would cancel years of integration between applications, disturbing two of the most popular digital consumer products in the world and potentially erase hundreds of billions of dollars of Meta market. This would also raise serious questions about how the government assesses and approves agreements.
Largest company
Under interrogations by Hansen, Zuckerberg refuted the FTC argument that Meta bought Instagram to bury a competitor. Instagram would probably not have been able to grow since he was, if he had remained independent, he said. “Instagram was built in a much more dynamic service” following the agreement, said Zuckerberg.
It is unlikely that a small online platform at a billion users and beyond that he will perform without the support of a larger company, he said. “Each business that has this level of scale belongs to a larger company,” he said, citing the examples of Google Tiktok and Google.
He was released earlier in the trial that Snap refused an offer of $ 6 billion in Facebook in 2013, and Zuckerberg said that the service would have increased more if he had joined his business.
In moments of combative questioning earlier this week by FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson, Zuckerberg sought to go back that he did in previous internal communications.
Zuckerberg recognized in an advertisement blocking the 2013 emails on Facebook for the WeChat, Kakao and Line application messaging, which he wrote “Try to create social networks to replace us”. On the stand this week, however, he said: “It is difficult for me to characterize what their intention was.”
When he was asked by Hansen to describe how he evaluated the competitive threat posed by Instagram and others at the time of the agreements, he referred to a quote from the former Intel The CEO of Corp., Andy Grove, saying “only the paranoid survives”.
Matheson also sought to show that Meta, then known as Facebook Inc., was aware of his antitrust risks years ago, including a possible break.
He showedA 2018 emailIn which Zuckerberg wrote: “While calls to break large technological companies grow up, there is a non-trivial chance that we are forced to shoot Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5 to 10 years.”
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
