A critical part of the defense of Mark Zuckerberg in the most serious antitrust challenge in Meta’s story this week had much to do with the technology giant and a lot to do with Tiktok.
As a testimony over three days, the founder of Billionaire Tech said on several occasions to a Washington Federal Federal Court that the video platform owned by Chinese Bytedance had become a formidable competitor.
The applause of his rival had an objective: to cancel the allegations of the American Federal Commerce Commission that META has retained an illegal monopoly, accused that, if it was proven, could potentially have deeper consequences for Zuckerberg’s affairs that any commercial threat with which it is confronted.
Losing the case, and Meta could be forced to break up her group of 1.5 TN and turn her Instagram and Whatsapp applications – a result that Zuckerberg previously promised to “go on the carpet and fight”. Win, and he will have won a decisive victory over a regulator who has long been in sight, continuing more recently the retail giant Amazon.
The trial comes after Zuckerberg did not negotiate the procedure in the first place. According to a person familiar with the issue, the FTC had required $ 30 billion as potential regulations; Meta Lowball at $ 450 million then increased its proposal to $ 1 billion after the regulator set a floor of $ 18 billion. The parties then decided to move to court.
At the heart of the continuation of the FTC is an allegation that META used a “systematic strategy” to eliminate competitors, in particular by acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp rivals in 2012 and 2014 for $ 1 billion and 19 billion dollars respectively.
FTC lawyers have presented evidence of Zuckerberg this week considering these emerging requests as a threat, including an uncomfortable multitude of emails. In 2012, Zuckerberg agreed to suggest that the Instagram agreement could help “neutralize a competitor” and also declared that he wanted Meta “to use mergers and acquisitions to build a competitive gap around us on mobile and advertisements”.
But such tactics may only be deemed illegal if the FTC can first prove that Meta retains a monopoly, an argument that some antitrust experts say will be more difficult to accumulate. This is a point that Zuckerberg and the former Meta-Chef Sheryl Sandberg chief chief focused on their testimonies, highlighting Tiktok’s explosive growth to serve more than a billion billion dollars worldwide.
“What they have said and thought in the past is not a great look, but it does not have much convincing value – if necessary – to know if Meta maintains a monopoly now,” said Paul Swanson, chief of antitrust practice and competition in Hutland & Hart.
“Zuckerberg and Sandberg have done a good job by explaining why it is a current reality – [that] Tiktok and Meta have the attrition of each other and replace each other in the minds of most users. “”
In antitrust challenges, the FTC must also prove that there have been damage to consumers, which would generally be a monopoly that increases prices. With Meta offering its services for free, the agency maintains rather that consumers have undergone degraded user experience due to the domination of the platform – flows filled with advertisements and bad privacy protections.
The main challenge for the FTC will be to convince James Boasberg, the President judge, which Meta has dominated – partly via acquisitions – a “personal social network” market focused on connections of friends and families, which does not include YouTube from Tiktok or Google.
A person close to previous settlement negotiations, who were reported for the first time by the Wall Street Journal, said that Meta’s lowball offer showed how much he considered the weakness of the FTC case. The FTC refused to comment.
“We did not hesitate to explain why he does not make sense to the FTC to bring a case in a case which requires that he proves that something every 17 years in America knows is absurd – that Instagram does not compete with Tiktok. We are ready to win at the trial,” said the spokesman for the Meta Dani raising in a press release.
But some experts argue that Boasberg, who has pronounced few words all week, could be receptive to the FTC arguments.
“The court is clearly open to the possibility that there is a personal social networking market,” said Kenneth Dintzer, partner of the antitrust group and Crowell & Moring competition. He referred to a file in 2024 in which Boasberg said that the FTC had “replied to his burden to show that other applications are not reasonable substitutes” to the sharing of friends and families.
Zuckerberg rejected this notion in court, pointing to the group rushing to develop reels – short videos – in response to the dazzling climb of Tiktok. Tiktok’s offer “probably [been] The highest competitive threat to Instagram and Facebook in recent years, “said Zuckerberg.
The Meta Boss also argued that WhatsApp and Instagram had been acquired to accelerate their growth, highlighting the dramatic jump of users after transactions.
The FTC A countered with a 2013 email, in which Zuckerberg argued before the WhatsApp agreement that “the biggest competitive vector for us is for a company to create a messaging application to communicate with small groups of people, then transform this into a wider social network”.
After proposing to teach Sandberg the board game Les ColonS de Catan, Zuckerberg said in a 2012 email: “[Facebook] Messenger does not beat Whatsapp, Instagram grew so much faster than we had to buy them for $ 1 billion. . . It is not exactly killing him.
“The confusing part of Mark’s testimony is that he is trying to contradict the statements today he made a decade ago, because these acquisitions were envisaged in real time,” said Lee Hepner, senior legal advisor to the anti-monopoly project of American economic freedoms.
Perhaps the most striking evidence came in the form of an email from Zuckerberg in 2018, where he planned to run Instagram-citing exactly the type of threat to the antitrust application with which he is confronted today.
As “calls to break large technological companies grow up,” he wrote: “There is a non-trivial chance that we are forced to transform Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next five to 10 years”.
