The meta-PDG Mark Zuckerberg, testifying in a historic American antitrust trial, admitted on Tuesday that Instagram had been acquired because its camera function was “better” than Facebook built at the time.
Recognition seemed to strengthen the allegations of American antitrust executors that Meta had used a “buy or bury” strategy to take potential rivals, keep the smallest competitors remotely and maintain an illegal monopoly.
He came on the second day of Zuckerberg during the trial high issues in Washington, in which the Federal Trade American Commission (FTC) seeks to relax Meta’s acquisitions of prized assets Instagram and Whatsapp.
The case, filed during President Donald Trump’s first term, is widely considered a test of the promises of the new Trump administration to take large technological companies.
Questioned by a lawyer for the FTC, if he thought that fast growing Instagram could be destructive for Meta, then known as Facebook, Zuckerberg said he thought that Instagram had a better camera product than Facebook.
“We did a construction analysis against purchase” while in creating a camera application, said Zuckerberg. “I thought that Instagram was better in this area, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
Zuckerberg also recognized that many attempts by the company creating its own applications had failed.
“The construction of a new application is difficult”
“The construction of a new application is difficult and much more than not when we have tried to create a new application, it has not obtained much traction,” Zuckerberg told court.
“We have probably tried to build dozens of applications on the history of the company and the majority of them are going nowhere,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s testimony intervenes while Meta defends herself for years after the publication of the jump statements drawn from Facebook’s own documents, such as a 2008 e-mail in which he said “it is better to buy only to compete”.
The company argues that its past intentions are not relevant because the FTC has defined the social media market in an inaccurate manner and did not take into account the rigid competition that Meta was confronted with Tiktok de Bytedance, Alphabet YouTube and Apple’s messaging application.
The FTC accuses Meta of holding a monopoly on the platforms used to share the content with friends and family, where its main competitors in the United States are Snapchat and Mewe of Snap, a small application of social media focused on privacy launched in 2016.
The platforms where users disseminate content to foreigners according to shared interests, such as X, Tiktok, YouTube and Reddit are not interchangeable, maintains the FTC.
