Mark is in litigation against monopoly claims

WhatsApp, Instagram and Meta: What’s up with Facebook? How did the US government respond to what happened in Facebook and Twitter?

The federal government claims that the purchases ofWhatsApp andInstagram solidified Meta’s status as a monopoly.

“The camera was good. The filter was good. They had good taste in their product. “It was an experience people enjoyed, and I had discussed building a photo service but it wasn’t ready yet”, said the co-owner of Facebook. “So I thought it was better to buy them,” he said.

The second day on the witness stand was tense with Mark Hansen, a lawyer for the FTC, trying to show the CEO’s thinking in regards to the deals that happened in the past.

“In particular, he will bear down on Zuckerberg emails that express apprehension that an independent Instagram could evolve quickly into a potent social network platform that would threaten Facebook,” Kovacic told NPR.

The case of Meta before the FBI: a reappraisal of the analogy between Facebook and Twitter, and how Trump could intervene in the case

Meta’s CEO strode into the courtroom flanked by two bodyguards. He was present to defend his company from being broken up by the US government, despite his last-ditch efforts to avoid a trial.

Meta’s advertising business could be destroyed if the judge sides with the government. Instagram is estimated to represent half of Meta’s overall advertising revenue, up from just 7% in 2015, according to analytics firm eMarketer.

The tech executive has testified under oath before. When he apologized to the parents of the audience for any harm his platforms caused their children, he addressed Congress a sixth time, and it was on child safety.

William Kovacic, former Republican chair of the FTC, said the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, will likely be weighing the rationale Zuckerberg provided for the Instagram and WhatsApp buys.

The supporters of the FTC’s case are concerned that Trump could intervene in the case and order the agency to settle.

In an interview on CNN, the former chair of the FTC said that the president’s interference in the case is a “constant worry that we need to be very careful about.”

Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Trade Commission’s lead attorney for the case, Daniel Matheson, asked Zuckerberg to reflect back on when Facebook was the underdog.

It seemed at least partially intended to give a historical context for Chief Judge James Boasberg, who admitted before the trial that he had never used a Meta service. (At one point, Boasberg asked the Meta CEO for a crash course on what “native code” meant. In return,Zuck eagerly obliged.

Why Facebook Matters to Meta? An Analysis of Zuckerberg’s Explanation of the FTC War with the Facts and the Law

In court, Zuckerberg downplayed the threat Instagram posed to Facebook at the time. “Yeah, of course,” he said in response to Matheson asking if both apps were competing to connect friends with each other. “Was that the main thing that was going on? Not to my recollection.

During Meta’s opening arguments, the company’s lead lawyer Mark Hansen argued that the FTC’s market definition is artificially narrow by excluding TikTok, iMessage, and other services. He called the case “a grab bag of FTC theories at war with the facts and at war with the law.”

Meta has monopoly power in a relevant market, but the FTC will have to demonstrate that the company acted illegally to achieve or maintain it’s position.

To hear Meta retell it, the company saw opportunities where it could invest and grow fledgling products into now-massive apps used around the world. But the FTC argues that, like Zuckerberg’s early refusal to sell to MySpace, Instagram and WhatsApp would have been just fine on their own.

Another FTC theory is that Meta has been able to increase its ad load over time because its users don’t have alternative services. Zuckerberg suggested that Meta at one point considered making a feed of only ads because its users think they’re as good as regular content.

When he was wondering about how to bring some early magic back to Facebook in 2022, Zuckerberg suggested the idea of wiping users’ friends lists to experience the joy of starting from scratch. He contemplated spinning off his own app, only to realize it would be too difficult to keep.

The Verge in Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill: From CNBC to the Verge on Privacy, Privacy, and the Content of Tech: a Senior Reporter

is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.