The FTC’s high-stakes antitrust lawsuit against Meta kicked off today with opening arguments in Washington, DC. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the stand to defend his company against the federal government’s claims that the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp should never have been approved.
The long-awaited antitrust trial between the FTC and Meta Platforms has kicked off in a federal courtroom in Washington, DC. The trial is set to feature testimony from some of the biggest names in tech, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is expected to be called as the first witness in the trial.
According to Daniel Matheson, the lead FTC lawyer in the case, Zuckerberg could face up to seven hours of questioning on the witness stand. The government’s grilling of the tech mogul is expected to focus on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, which the FTC argues were part of a “buy or bury” strategy to maintain the company’s dominance in the social media market.
In his opening statements, Matheson presented a 2012 email from Zuckerberg to then-COO Sheryl Sandberg, in which the CEO wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion… That’s not exactly killing it.” The FTC contends that this message demonstrates Zuckerberg’s unfiltered thinking about the competitive social media landscape at the time.
The government’s case, which began in 2020 under the Trump administration and has continued under President Biden’s antitrust team, seeks to force Meta to divest both Instagram and WhatsApp. These platforms boast over 2 billion active users each, and their spinoff would represent a significant blow to Meta’s business.
In addition to Zuckerberg, the FTC plans to call former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri to testify. The agency argues that Meta’s acquisitions have allowed the company to reap massive economic profits beyond what would be expected in a competitive environment.
Meta, however, maintains that it has been a fair player and a source of innovation in the social media space. In his opening remarks, Meta attorney Mark Hansen called the government’s case a “grab bag of FTC theories at war with the facts and at war with the law.” He emphasized the intense competition Meta faces from rivals like TikTok, YouTube, and others, noting that “more than 100 million more Americans use WhatsApp and they don’t pay a cent, after Meta made it free.”
Meta claims that the FTC’s case is “weak,” writing: “More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
