The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made a key concession in an American antimonopoly trial on Tuesday, saying that he bought Instagram because he had a “better” camera than his company was trying to build for the flagship application Facebook at that time.
The recognition seemed to strengthen the accusations of the antitrust executors of the United States that Meta had used a strategy of “buying or burying” to accumulate possible rivals, keep smaller competitors at bay and maintain an illegal monopoly.
He arrived during the second day of Zuckerberg testifying in the high -risk trial in Washington, in which the Federal United States Trade Commission (FTC) seeks to relax the acquisitions of Preciado Meta of Preciados Instagram and WhatsApp.
The case, presented during President Donald Trump’s first mandate, is widely seen as proof of the promises of the new Trump administration to face large technology companies.
Asked by an FTC lawyer if I thought that fast -growing Instagram could be destructive for the finish line, then known as Facebook, Zuckerberg said he thought Instagram had a better camera product than Facebook I was building.
“We were doing a compilation analysis against buying” while I was in the process of building a camera application, said Zuckerberg. “I thought Instagram was better about that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that many of the company’s attempts to build their own applications had failed.
‘Building a new application is difficult’
“Building a new application is difficult and many times more than when we try to build a new application, it has not received a lot of traction,” Zuckerberg told court.
“We probably try to build dozens of applications about the company’s history and most of them are not going anywhere,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s testimony occurs when Meta defends herself years after the release of condemned statements expelled from Facebook’s own documents, as an email of 2008 in which she said: “It is better to buy than to compete.”
The company argues that its past intentions are irrelevant because the FTC has defined the social media market inactively and failed to account for the tough competition that Meta has faced from Tiktok by Bytedonce, the application of Alphabet’s YouTube and Apple messaging.
The FTC accuses the goal of maintaining a monopoly on the platforms used to share content with friends and family, where its main competitors in the United States are Snapchat and Mewe of Snap, a small application of social networks focused on privacy in 2016.
The platforms where users transmit content to strangers based on shared interests, such as X, Tiktok, YouTube and Reddit are not interchangeable, the FTC argues.
