Lauren Feiner

Instagram’s growth was never preordained, Zuckerberg says, and the app benefited from Meta’s investment to get to the massive reach it has today. At the time of the deal in 2012, Zuckerberg hoped to grow Instagram from 10 million to 100 million users. It reached a billion users by 2018. Had Meta not bought Instagram, Zuckerberg says, “it’s very hard to know” how things would have turned out. That’s a key challenge for the FTC to address.

The CEO is challenging one of the core arguments of the FTC’s case: Meta’s alleged intent to grow its monopoly power by taking out rivals. “Was the intent to stop offering or stop making Instagram good? Absolutely not,” he testifies.

This old Andy Grove quote is how Zuckerberg describes his mindset toward competition. He says it has been interesting to look back on all the things he was worried about that never materialized the way he expected. One example is Dropbox, which he saw as an “upstream” feature that could eventually become competitive based on its photo storage offerings. “I was focused on things that ended up being so different,” he says.

Zuckerberg says network effects — where more users on a platform makes it better — are not always a good thing, even though the FTC says they’ve grown Meta’s power. He’s previously worried about this so much he’s considered resetting users’ Facebook friends. After accumulating friends over time, users might “wake up one day five years later” and realize they’re following people they no longer care about, he says. But AI recommendations have helped solve for this.

We’ve seen a lot of old emails over the past couple of days where Zuckerberg has expressed frustration and a sense of urgency to catch up with rivals that seem to be on Meta’s heels. He’s spinning these documents as a function of his own competitive spirit. “You can bet that I’m not going to rest until we do quite a bit better than where we’re at now,” he testifies about today’s competition with TikTok.

We’re getting started with day three of Meta’s antitrust trial with some controversy. A Snap attorney complains to Judge Boasberg that Meta released slides with inadvertently flawed redactions. He also accuses Meta’s lead attorney of openly referencing Snap’s competitive assessments that should have been private.

In an echo of an infamous exchange from one of Zuckerberg’s earlier visits to Washington, Judge James Boasberg asks the CEO to clarify how iMessage and WhatsApp make money. Zuckerberg explains that Meta sells ads that send people to chat with businesses on WhatsApp. He also tells the judge that he thinks Apple is incentivized to keep iMessage exclusive to iOS so that its users don’t want to switch from iPhones to Android.

When asked by Meta’s lead lawyer, Mark Hansen, Zuckerberg says he doesn’t know what MeWe is and “hadn’t heard of it” prior to this case. Aside from Snapchat, MeWe is the other app the government says is in the same “personal social networking services” market that Meta allegedly monopolizes.

As an aside to a question about European regulations, Zuckerberg says that “it seems no matter what we do, the European Union seems to find we’re not following their rules.”