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A critical component of Mark Zuckerberg’s defense in the most serious cartel challenge in the history of Meta this week had little to do with the technology giant and a lot with Tiktok.
In three days, the founder of billionaire Tech repeated a US federal court in Washington that the video platform of the Chinese parents -by -tedance had become an enormous competitor.
The praise of his rival had one goal: to open up the allegations of the US Federal Trade Commission that this is present Meta Keep an illegal monopoly, accused if it has been proven, possibly have far -reaching consequences for Zuckerberg’s business than any commercial threat with which it is exposed.
If you lose the case, and Meta could be forced to break up your 1.5 TONTN group of 1.5 participants and equip your Instagram and WhatsApp apps -a result Pile of sugar previously sworn to “go to the mat and fight”. Win and will win a decisive victory over a regulatory authority that has long been targeting tech tech and has recently sued the retail giants Amazon.
The process takes place after Zuckerberg did not negotiate the procedure at all. According to a person familiar with the matter, the FTC had requested $ 30 billion as a potential agreement. Meta lowballet for $ 450 million increased its proposal to USD 1 billion after the supervisory authority set a soil of $ 18 billion. The parties then decided to go to court.
At the center of the FTC lawsuit is the assertion that Meta has a “systematic strategy” for the elimination of competitors, including the acquisition of competitors Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 for USD 1 billion or $ 19 billion.
FTC lawyers this week have submitted evidence that Zuckerberg regarded these aspiring applications as a threat, including a variety of unpleasant e -mails. In 2012, Zuckerberg approved the suggestions that the Instagram deal could help neutralize a competitor, and also said he wanted Meta to “use M&A to build up a competitive ditch on us on mobile devices and displays”.
However, this tactic may only be considered illegal if the FTC can first prove that Meta maintains a monopoly. An argument that some antitrust law experts will say will be more difficult to stack. It is a point that concentrated Zuckerberg and the former operating officer of Meta, Sheryl Sandberg, and emphasized the explosive growth of Tiktok in order to serve more than 1 billion users worldwide.
“What she said and thought in the past is not a great appearance, but it doesn’t have much evaluation – if at all – whether Meta maintains a monopoly now,” said Paul Swanson, head of the Cartellus and competition practice in Holland & Hart.
“Zuckerberg and Sandberg did a good job to explain why this is a current reality – (the) TikTok and Meta have a wear and tear and replace each other in most users.”
In the case of antitrust challenges, the FTC must also prove that there was consumer damage, which would normally be a monopolist that increases prices. Instead, since Meta offers its services free of charge, the agency argues that consumers have suffered a new user experience due to the dominance of the platform – feed that is filled with ads and poor protective measures.
The most important challenge for the FTC will be to convince James Boasberg, the chairman, that Meta-Zum has dominated part through acquisition-one market for “personal social networking”, which focuses on connections between friends and family members, to which no Tikok or Google contains.
A person near the earlier settlement negotiations, which were first reported by Wall Street Journal, said that the Lowball offer from Meta showed how weak it considered in the case of the FTC. The FTC rejected a statement.
“We have not spared ourselves to explain why it makes no sense for the FTC to put a case in court that requires that every 17-year-old in America knows that absurd is an absurd instagram. We are ready to win in court,” said meta spokesman Dani Lever in an explanation.
However, some experts argue that Boasberg, who has expressed only a few words all week, could be receptive to the arguments of the FTC.
“The court is clearly open to the possibility that there is a personal market for social networks,” said Kenneth Dintzer, partner of the antitrust and competition group at Crowell & Moring. He referred to a registration of 2024, in which Boasberg said that the FTC had “fulfilled its burden to show that other applications are not reasonable substitutes for friends and family releases.
Zuckerberg rejected this term in court and pointed out that the group in response to Tikkok’s meteoric ascent roles-short-form video-developed. Tikok’s offer was “probably (probably the highest competition 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 and pointed out the dramatic jump of the users after the deals.
The FTC countered with an e -mail from 2013 in which Zuckerberg argued in front of the WhatsApp deal that “the largest competitive vector for us is that some companies build a messaging app for communication with small groups of people and then convert them into a wider social network”.
After Zuckerberg had offered Sandberg to teach the board game, the settlers of Catan, in an e -mail from 2012: “(Facebook) Messenger did not beat WhatsApp and grew as much faster than us that we had to buy it for $ 1 billion. It didn’t kill it exactly.”
“The confusing part of Mark’s testimony is that today he tries to contradict statements that he was considered a decade ago in real time ago in real time,” said Lee Hepner, Senior Legal Counsel for the Anti-Monopoly Noncoly American Economic Liberties project.
Perhaps the most striking evidence came in the form of a Zuckerberg -E email in 2018, where he Extended in Instagram to turn off – cites exactly the type of threat through the enforcement of antitrust rights with which it is exposed today.
As “calls for the division of the large technology companies”, he wrote: “There is a non -trivial chance that we will be forced in the next five to ten years to score out Instagram and maybe WhatsApp.”
