The Executive Director of Meta Platforms, Mark Zuckerberg, went up to the stage this Monday in a high -risk trial in Washington for the statements of the American antimonopoopoopoolio agent that the company spent billions of dollars to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp to defend against Facebook competitors.
The Federal Commerce Commission (FTC) seeks to force the goal of restructuring or selling Instagram and WhatsApp, testing the promises of President Donald Trump to face large technological ones and representing an existential threat to a company that, according to some estimates, obtains approximately half of its advertising income in the United States of Instagram.
Dressed in a dark suit and a light blue tie, Zuckerberg calmly answered the questions while looking to combat accusations that Meta bought the companies a decade ago to eliminate competition between social networks platforms where users connect with friends and family.
Zuckerberg emphasized that sharing with friends and family was just a priority for application along with discovering other content.
In fact, a 2018 decision to prioritize the Facebook content shared by users’ friends over video publications and other public content failed to capture a change towards users sharing that content through messages instead of publishing life updates in their feeds, Zuckerberg said.
“I think we misunderstood how social interaction was evolving online,” said Zuckerberg. “People continued to interact with more and more things that were not what their friends did,” he added.
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He calculated that now about 20% of the content on Facebook and 10% on Instagram is generated by user friends, unlike accounts that continue based on their interests.
COPTENCIA CON TICKTOK
The FTC has indicated emails in which Zuckerberg proposed to acquire the application to share Instagram photographs as a way to neutralize a potential Facebook competitor and expressed concern that the WhatsApp encrypted messaging service could become a social network.
Meta has argued that his Instagram purchases in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 have benefited users, and that the past statements of Zuckerberg are no longer relevant in the midst of the Tiktok competition of Bytedance, Google YouTube and Apple Messenger application.
The way users spend time on social networks and what services they consider interchangeable will be essential for the case. Goal will argue that the increase in traffic to Instagram and Facebook during the brief closure of Tiktok in the United States in January demonstrates direct competition.
The antitrust regulator states that Meta has the monopoly of the platforms used to share content with friends and family, where its main competitors in the United States are Snapchat of Snap and Mewe, a small application of social networks focused on privacy launched in 2016.
Platforms where users transmit content to strangers based on shared interests, such as X, Tiktok, YouTube and Reddit, are not interchangeable, has argued the FTC.
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The American district judge James Boasberg said in a ruling in November that the FTC “faces difficult questions about whether their statements can be sustained in the melting pot.”
The trial could be extended until July. If the FTC wins, it would have to demonstrate separately what measures such as forcing the goal to sell Instagram or WhatsApp would restore competition.
Losing Instagram in particular could be catastrophic for finishing results.
Although target does not publish specific income figures of each application, the EMARKETER advertising firm predicted in December that Instagram would generate $ 37,130 million this year, a little more than half of the target advertising in the United States.
Instagram also generates more user income than any other social platform, including Facebook, according to Emarketer.
To date, WhatsApp has only contributed a small part of the total target income, but it is the application with more daily users of the company and is intensifying its efforts to generate income with tools such as chatbots.
Zuckerberg has affirmed that these “business messaging” services will probably boost the company’s next growth wave.
Trump against great technologies
The case is part of an offensive against large technology companies initiated during the first Trump administration.
Meta has been making regular approaches to Trump since his choice, eliminating content moderation policies that the Republicans described as censorship and donating a million dollars to Trump’s investiture. Zuckerberg has also visited the White House several times in recent weeks.
Amazon, Apple and Alphabet Google also face antitrust demands by US authorities.
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Several large technology companies have taken measures to align with Trump from the election, for example, backward in diversity initiatives and allowing their executives to interact directly with the White House.
While this represents a change regarding the combative tone that companies adopted during Trump’s first mandate, it has not resulted in a withdrawal of antitrust cases.
With Reuters information
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