Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood up Monday to face the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a case where his social media company could determine the fate of the tech Titan Empire.
The FTC called Zuckerberg the first witness. This shows that Meta will acquire Instagram and WhatsApp to further establish and protect personal social networking.
Opening the debate on Monday morning, the agency claimed that Facebook’s parent company was struggling to compete in the early 2010s as consumers moved from the website to the mobile app.
With the popularity of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp increasingly, Meta initially tried to offer similar products before eventually getting the apps for $1 billion and $19 billion respectively. The FTC described this as a driving force to neutralize its competitors.
“The reason we’re here is because for over 100 years, American public policy has argued that businesses must compete if they want to succeed,” Daniel Matheson, the lead lawyer representing the FTC, said at the opening Monday. “Meta has broken that deal.”
The agency is trying to separate the meta platform from other social media apps such as Tiktok and YouTube by claiming that Facebook and Instagram are focused on connecting friends and family. According to FTC, another major competitor in this market is Snapchat.
Meta claims it is not a monopoly and faces direct competition with Tiktok, YouTube and many other platforms.
“This case is a grab bag of FTC theory in the war with facts and war with law,” said Meta’s lead lawyer, Mark Hansen. “The FTC wants people to believe that this case is about sharing between friends and family.”
However, he insisted that “the facts are different.”
