Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg on Monday was forced to defend against allegations that he employed a “buy or bury” strategy to crush rivals as the Federal Trade Commission’s landmark antitrust trial that seeks to break up the social media giant got underway.
Clad in a dark suit, the bushy-haired billionaire landed on the hot seat in US District Court in Washington, DC, as the first witness in a case that claims Facebook’s parent company spent billions of dollars to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp to fend off competitors.
Zuckerberg immediately pushed back on the FTC’s attempt to define Meta as being dominant among social media firms that are built on sharing between friends and family — with Snapchat and another app called MeWe as its only direct competitors, and platforms like TikTok placed in a separate category.
He emphasized that friends and family sharing was only one priority for the app along with discovering other content.
“The ‘friend’ part has gone down quite a bit but it’s still something we care about,” Zuckerberg calmly responded in a monotone to questioning from the FTC’s lead trial lawyer Daniel Matheson.
The agency is seeking to force Meta to restructure or sell Instagram and WhatsApp, testing President Donald Trump’s promises to take on Big Tech while posing an existential threat to a company that by some estimates earns about half of its US advertising revenue from Instagram.
The FTC’s case hinges on whether it can convince Judge James Boasberg in the non-jury trial that their definition of Meta’s market is accurate.
Meta, meanwhile, has asserted that the FTC is wrong to exclude fierce competition it faces from TikTok, Google-owned YouTube and other platforms for user attention.
Zuckerberg was allotted seven hours of trial time for his testimony – far more than any other witness, according to a previous court filing.
He will return to the stand Tuesday, with the focus of Matheson’s grilling expected to be on smoking-gun emails from Zuckerberg to other executives.
Meta shares sank more than 2% in Monday trading.
During opening statements, Matheson said the company’s strategy to buy its upstart rivals “established entry barriers that for more than a decade protected Meta’s dominance.”
“Consumers do not have reasonable alternatives they can turn to,” Matheson alleged in US District Court in Washington, DC.
Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014 – both deals approved by President Barack Obama’s FTC.
“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,” Meta said in a statement.
“Regulators should be supporting American innovation, rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI,” the company added.
The case was first brought in 2020 during Trump’s first term in office.
Meta does not break out its revenue figures by app, but Instagram is projected to generate around $37.13 billion in US ad revenue this year, according to EMarketer data. Last year, the company’s global revenue was $164.5 billion, the vast bulk of it from ads.
Meta attorney Mark Hansen said in his opening statement that the FTC ignores that people today share a lot less with friends and family on social media, and that Instagram and Facebook users spend most of their time viewing short videos via features modeled after TikTok.
“This case is a grab bag of FTC theories at war with the facts and at war with the law,” he said.
Other high-profile names set to appear during the trial include former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, current Instagram boss Adam Mosseri and current Meta COO Javier Olivan.
Zuckerberg has been aggressively lobbying Trump to settle the FTC’s case as part of a broader effort to cozy up to his administration.
The billionaire has reportedly personally visited the White House at least three times since he took office in January. Zuckerberg also cut a $1 million check toward Trump’s inauguration, ended Meta’s DEI efforts and eliminated fact-checking to woo the president.
Despite those efforts, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson affirmed ahead of the trial that his team was fully prepared to pursue the case to its conclusion.
Ferguson was in attendance Monday.
FTC spokesperson Joe Simonson said “the Trump-Vance FTC could not be more ready for this trial.”
Zuckerberg is expected to face tough questions focused on emails he sent around the time of the acquisitions. In one instance from April 2012, Zuckerberg sent emails discussing whether to buy Instagram.
“Instagram can hurt us meaningfully without becoming a huge business,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time.
Meta has denied any wrongdoing, asserting that the FTC’s lawsuit “defies reality.”
The FTC will have to clear a high bar to achieve a breakup. Boasberg warned in a November ruling that the agency “faces hard questions about whether its claims can hold up in the crucible of trial.”
The FTC is just one of several legal and regulatory headaches facing Meta.
The European Union is days away from slapping Meta with a significant fine for violations of its Digital Markets Act — with sources telling The Post the amount could surpass $1 billion.
Separately, former Facebook executive-turned-whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams delivered damning testimony on Capitol Hill last week accusing Zuckerberg and other executives of selling out US national security to China in a failed bid to gain access to its market.
With Post wires
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