Mark Zuckerberg tells court Meta has more competitors than antitrust commission claims

WASHINGTON – Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg argued in federal court that his company’s social networks are not just about friends, taking the stand as the first witness for the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust trial.

The FTC is seeking to break up Meta Platforms, arguing that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, in 2012 and 2014 respectively, gave it an illegal monopoly on sharing with friends and family.

Mr Zuckerberg disputed the FTC’s allegations, arguing that Meta competes with a wider range of social media companies that the company has said include YouTube, TikTok and Snap.

In initial questioning by the FTC’s lead trial lawyer, Mr Daniel Matheson, Mr Zuckerberg described the company’s early history and acknowledged that he rejected advice to sell the company early on because it would not be possible to compete with MySpace.

Mr Zuckerberg went on to describe the creation of the Facebook news feed in 2006 to facilitate “real connections to actual friends”. That use is key to the FTC’s argument that the company is primarily focused on sharing information with friends and family.

Mr Zuckerberg said the business coming from connecting friends has declined, while other parts of the company have grown more. 

Allowing people to connect with friends and family “remains one of our priorities”, Mr Zuckerberg said. However, “we’ve always been a service that lets you discover and learn about what’s going on in the world”.

Around the mobile app boom between 2010 and 2012, Mr Zuckerberg struggled to get his teams to build quality products for photo-sharing.

Mr Matheson displayed e-mails from Mr Zuckerberg expressing concern that Facebook was far behind Instagram, including a June 2011 message stating the need to “get their act together quickly”.

In September that year, he said “if Instagram continues to kick a-- on mobile or if Google buys them, then over the next few years they could easily add pieces of their service that copy what we’re doing now and if they have a growing number of people’s photos, then that’s a real issue for us”.

In February 2012, Mr Zuckerberg wrote a message contemplating a purchase of Instagram “even if it costs ~$500m”.

On stand

After the first day of the trial on April 14, Mr Zuckerberg, 40, is expected to be on the stand for much of April 15.

He walked in with his assistant, wearing a navy suit and a powder-blue tie. The courtroom was full when he started his testimony, but spectators began filtering out as the questioning continued.

The trial started earlier on April 14 with opening statements from both sides, with Chief Judge James Boasberg presiding. Agency attorneys kicked off their arguments by invoking a long US tradition of seeking to ensure a competitive marketplace, one that the FTC has accused Meta of violating.

“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” Mr Matheson said in his opening statement.

“The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.” 

If the FTC prevails, a spin-off of Instagram and WhatsApp would undo years of integration between the apps, disrupt two of the most popular digital consumer products in the world and potentially erase hundreds of billions of dollars in Meta’s market value.

It would also raise serious questions about how the government evaluates and approves deals.

The trial is expected to last about two months and also feature testimony from former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg.

The company argued on April 14 that it faces fierce competition from several other services, especially as social media becomes more about entertainment than friends and family, and that it has provided demonstrable benefit to its users.

A final decision will hinge on how social media is defined, and whether Meta dominates that market.

The FTC will focus on how people communicate with friends and family – what it calls the “personal social networking services” market, which it claims is composed primarily of messages and media shared between close contacts.

‘Killer acquisitions’

The FTC argues that Meta’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp are “killer acquisitions” that prevented those companies from competing.

To support its case that Meta is a monopoly, the FTC will argue that the quality of its apps has declined, most noticeably with increased ads and weakened privacy protections.

In 2010, “Meta was faced with a sea change in competitive conditions”, Mr Matheson said, referring to the growing mobile market.

“They decided that competition was too hard, and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them.”

Meta bought WhatsApp in part to fend off an offer from Alphabet Inc’s Google, which was also considering buying the company, according to Mr Matheson.

And Meta also considered buying Snap for US$6 billion (S$8 billion) in 2013, though the Snapchat owner turned the offer down.

The number was not previously known, as reports at the time pegged the discussions as for half that much.

Snap representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment April 14.

In his opening argument, Mr Matheson said the FTC will highlight “smoking gun” e-mails from Meta execs including Mr Zuckerberg, particularly one from 2012 where he described the Instagram deal as a way to “neutralise a competitor”.

After Meta bought Instagram, it “fundamentally manipulated the experience” offered by the service, Mr Matheson said, allowing it to avoid cannibalising its own more profitable Facebook product.

While that is a “rational business decision”, Mr Matheson said it “offends the policy” of the antitrust laws.

Multiple competitors

Meta has pushed back aggressively against the FTC’s claims, arguing that it competes intensely with a variety of platforms, including ByteDance’s TikTok, Snap’s Snapchat, Google’s YouTube, Apple’s iMessage and Elon Musk’s X.

The FTC’s case is “at war with the facts and at war with the law”, said Meta lawyer Mark Hansen in his opening remarks, noting that of all Meta’s competitors, Mr Matheson mentioned TikTok only once in his opening statement.

The agency said that only Snapchat competes with Meta, and that other past competitors, including MySpace, are now defunct.

Mr Hansen said that consumers’ use of the apps has changed dramatically over time, shifting to more passive engagement such as video, with Instagram’s Reels, YouTube’s Shorts and TikTok.

While the FTC is focused on people’s use of the services to communicate with friends and family, Mr Hansen said that has dropped precipitously, with less than 20 per cent of Meta customers using the services for those functions in 2025. 

To make his point, Mr Hansen pointed to the January 2025 TikTok “ban”, noting that both Facebook and Instagram saw spikes in usage while TikTok was down.

He said Facebook saw 20 per cent “more usage” during that time, while Instagram usage increased 17 per cent.

“The FTC’s entire case turns on convincing the court that Meta doesn’t compete with TikTok,” Mr Hansen said.

He added that the agency has not proved that Meta has raised prices, lessened options for consumers or decreased the quality of its services. It has offered no “benchmarks” of how to measure that, Mr Hansen said.

“In the absence of benchmarks, allegations of raised prices and decreased quality prove nothing.”

Mr Hansen also argued Meta has driven “hundreds of billions, maybe more than a trillion dollars in undeniable consumer welfare benefits”, stemming from the two deals, which led to a jump in users as infrastructure improved.

Meta also argued that the FTC had a chance to challenge the deals – for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 – but permitted them to proceed.

Meta had several key executives present in the courtroom on April 14, including head of policy Joel Kaplan, general counsel Jennifer Newstead and chief marketing officer Alex Schultz.

The FTC opened an investigation into Meta in 2019 during the first Trump administration and sued the company in December 2020.

Former FTC chair Lina Khan under the Biden administration advanced the case, which is now in the hands of chair Andrew Ferguson, who was named by President Donald Trump to head the agency in January. BLOOMBERG