Instagram would have had “many problems” to grow without Facebook and WhatsApp “did not have enough ambition”: Mark Zuckerberg defended the decisions of his group Group on Wednesday to acquire these two requests at the head of a Washington court, for the third consecutive day.
The giant of US social networks is accused by the United States of buying Instagram and WhatsApp over ten years ago to prevent any competition from emerging against Facebook and Messenger.
If the Federal Court judge decides in favor of the Consumer Protection Agency, the FTC could be forced to separate from its two flagship platforms.
An impossible success without Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg says that these two services would not have been the same success with users without the investments of his company. “It is very difficult to reach such size. We must innovate and solve many technical, organizational and legal problems,” he argued about Instagram, which today has 2 billion users in the world.
The trial opened on Monday, five years after the complaint appeared under Trump’s first government, and has to last eight weeks. For the FTC, Meta – then Facebook – Instagram acquired in 2012 for one billion dollars and WhatsApp in 2014 for 19 billion to “eliminate immediate threats.”
Mark Zuckerberg again rejected this interpretation on Wednesday. “We were interested in the experience (of Instagram) in photography and the exchange of images, but we do not perceive the application as a real network in competition with what we were doing at that time.” Facebook then worked on their own photo tool, and their teams weighed the pros and cons between internal development and an acquisition.
In addition to defending the interests of consumers, the trial will be played with the definition of the market in question. The FTC affirms that the goal services are divided into “personal social networks”, which allows to keep in touch with family and friends, and that its domination results in degraded use for users, forced to tolerate too many ads, for example.
Fierce competition
Menlo Park’s firm (Silicon Valley), says he faces fierce competition from other large platforms, including Tiktok and YouTube, popular among Internet users but also content creators.
In front of Tiktok’s dazzling Boom, “we saw that our growth slowed dramatically,” said Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday. His group responded with the “reels”, short and entertaining videos copied from the format that made the success of the Chinese application.
“Every time you go to your computer or your phone, you have the option,” said Sheryl Sandberg, former business director, second witness, called the bar. “That is why all services fight: their time and attention.”
Mark Zuckerberg has courted Donald Trump a lot to resolve the case in a friendly way, but the FTC, even under the Republican Presidency, seems to be determined to continue with the various antitrust actions launched in recent years in the technology sector.
Google was convicted of abuse of a dominant position in the online research market last August, while Apple and Amazon are also subject to prosecution.
Source: BFM TV
