The Meta trial, the Facebook parent company accused of buying Instagram and WhatsApp to suffocate possible competitors, opened Monday in Washington despite the efforts of its boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to avoid it.
The billionaire was first called the helm, for a three -hour audience centered on the beginnings of Facebook. He was remarkably questioned in the period prior to the acquisition of Instagram for one billion dollars, in April 2012, as reported by the US media The Verge.
The main lawyer of the FTC, Daniel Matheson, showed the internal emails of the CEO in which he warned his colleagues that the early boom on Instagram was “really scary” for Facebook. “If Instagram continues with cardboard on mobile devices or if Google buys it, then in the coming years, it could easily add elements that would copy what we are doing now,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in one of his emails.
Minimize the threat
In other exchanges, the billionaire also complained about the slowness of the development of its commercial photography application, Facebook Camera. Instagram that represents a threat to its social network, even issued the idea, in a message, to buy the application, but to do nothing in February 2012.
However, during the trial, Mark Zuckerberg sought to minimize the threat represented by Instagram for Facebook at that time. When Daniel Matheson asked him if the two applications were in competition to connect friends among them, the founding mission of Facebook, he replied that was the case.
“No, as I know,” he replied when the FTC lawyer asked him if “it was the main thing that was happening,” the main threat, at that time.
Goal “decided that the competition was too difficult and that it would be easier to buy from their rivals instead of competing with them,” he defended Daniel Matheson in his introductory comments, in a very adorned room. It was that goal “eliminated immediate threats,” he insisted.
While Mark Zuckerberg will be heard again on Tuesday, as part of this trial that will last eight weeks, his lawyers will try to demonstrate that Instagram and WhatsApp have become essential applications that thanks to the investments of their group.
The case arrived in court five years after the complaint under the first Trump government. If the social networks giant loses, it could be forced to separate from its two flagship platforms.
Source: BFM TV
