The president of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, previews the start of the antitrust case of the agency against Meta and details the deregular agenda of the Trump administration.
Meta-PDG Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Monday before the Federal Court to testify on the first day of a historic antitrust case against his business – a case that accuses Zuckerberg and other senior managers of buying smaller applications like Instagram and Whatsapp illegally to create a social media monopoly.
The lawyers of the Federal Trade Commission said during the opening remarks on Monday that they will seek to prove, during the several weeks of hearing, that Meta that Meta that Meta that Meta Buyed Instagram And WhatsApp as part of a so-called “buy or bury” strategy used to stifle competition and alternatives, in particular from applications that it was a threat to their platform.
“They decided that competition was too difficult, and it would be easier to buy their rivals rather than competing with them,” said FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson on Monday.
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For more than a decade, he argued, this strategy allowed Meta to buy their competition for well above the market value-establishing “obstacles to entry” to protect their domination on social networks.
Matheson and the FTC accuse the meta of the employment of the strategy to win a monopoly on what is called the “personal social networks” market.
In the event of success, the FTC would probably ask the court to order Meta to restructure its company, or to disintegrate with acquired companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
The victory would be a notable victory for the federal government at a time when he had trouble prevailing in the challenges of the courts involving the Silicon Valley and his complex network of start-ups which has increased, apparently overnight, in large companies.
Meta is now worth 1.4 billion of dollars. If the FTC lawyers prevail in their antitrust trial against Meta, it would be the greatest dissolution of an American company since the rupture of the rupture of AT&T in the early 1980s.
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Despite the long tail of the trial, which should be played in front of the Federal Court until the beginning of the summer, the FTC lawyers lost a short time on Monday to call their first witness, the meta-PDS Mark Zuckerberg, at the stand.
There, Zuckerberg was grilled by the emails he sent concerning the purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
In the 2012 email, Zuckerberg said that Instagram had experienced such rapid growth that his own business “should” buy it in Matheson’s story.
“It is an email written by someone who recognized Instagram as a threat and was forced to sacrifice a billion dollars because Meta could not respond to this threat by competition,” said Matheson.
He also faced questions about Facebook’s transformation, the FTC of which originally noted as a site designed to facilitate connections between peers to the one that presented more third -party content, including news and group activity.
“Over time, the” interest “part of this has been built more than the” friend “part,” said Zuckerberg in response.
Zuckerberg said that users are now “connected to many more groups and other types of things” compared to its first days.
“The” friend “part has dropped a little, but it’s always something that is close to our hearts,” he said.
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Meanwhile, Meta’s lawyer, Mark Hansen, sought to reject the case in their opening remarks a “handbag” of the theories of the FTC “at war with the law”.
“The facts will prove that the theories of the FTC are all false,” said Hansen Judge James Boasbergthe judge president in the trial.
Meta lawyers have sought to challenge the FTC description of the so -called “personal social networks” applications and argued that their competitors are much more important – extending to companies such as Tiktok, Linkedin and others.
During the hearing, Boasberg listened carefully and took notes, sometimes prohibiting to ask questions or ask for additional details.
The trial of the bench will be decided by a single judge – in this case, judge Boasberg – and is expected to last approximately eight weeks.
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Later this week, the court should hear other former senior META officials, with witnesses including former operations director Sheryl Sandberg, former director of technology Andrew Bosworth and others.
