Lauren Feiner

In a February 2012 message, Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea of acquiring Instagram but not doing much with it so that new competitors wouldn’t creep into the market. On the stand, Zuckerberg deflects this as early thinking and says Facebook ultimately didn’t take this route. The FTC’s attorney points out that this was only a couple of months before the acquisition. From Zuckerberg’s message at the time:

Zuckerberg is walking through his mindset in February 2012 when he was considering acquiring the rapidly growing photo app. He asked colleagues if a purchase might be worth it even if it costs $500 million. “Theoretically we could go build this technology, but I’m worried we’re so far behind,” he wrote. Zuckerberg testifies he was considering this move ahead of their IPO when, for the first time, the company would have money to consider buying some products.

The FTC is pointing to internal messages from 2011 where Zuckerberg complained that the company was moving too slow on its Facebook Camera app while Instagram was growing rapidly. It turns out, according to messages from other executives at the time, that this was in part because Facebook had interns working on the critical project, rather than more experienced engineers.

There are no fireworks yet. The government is working to elicit answers that might help it establish its view that the relevant part of the social media market Meta dominates is about connecting with friends. Zuckerberg testifies that engaging with friends’ posts is not as much a part of the experience as it was in the past, but concedes that as the service has grown, it’s still a big part of users’ experiences in absolute terms.

The FTC just called the Meta CEO as its first witness. The government has budgeted several hours for him to testify, so he’ll likely cover a lot of ground.

The company accuses the government of backing into a view of the social media market that makes it look like a monopoly, while ignoring robust competitors. It also charted how TikTok’s brief time offline in the US led users to flee to other apps, including its own. See for yourself.

Meta’s attorney Mark Hansen paints the government’s case as one comprised of made-up theories about how both the social media market and the law work. He accuses the government of ignoring TikTok’s massive role in social media by excluding it from its definition of the market that Meta allegedly monopolized.

Prior to buying those nascent apps in 2012 and 2014, Facebook recognized both as significant competition, Federal Trade Commission attorney Daniel Matheson argues to open the government’s case.

I’m here with my colleague Alex Heath at the federal courthouse in Washington, DC where the Federal Trade Commission and Meta are set to lay out their opening arguments beginning at 9:30 AM Eastern Time. Meta is fighting charges that it illegally monopolized a subset of the social media market through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp years ago.