Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, took the witness stand in a landmark antitrust trial for a third day, saying on Wednesday that the video app TikTok has emerged as a serious competitor in social networking.
In a friendly exchange led by lawyers for Meta, Mr Zuckerberg said the fast growth of the Chinese-owned app was “probably the highest competitive threat for Instagram and Facebook over the last few years”.
Mr Zuckerberg’s lawyers were trying to poke holes in the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) case, which went to trial on Monday. The FTC has accused the social media company, previously known as Facebook, of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups in a “buy-or-bury strategy” to snuff out competition.
Meta’s core function is connecting friends and family, making Snapchat its only serious social media competitor, the FTC has said.
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Mr Zuckerberg countered during his more than seven hours of testimony so far this week that Meta faces significant competition in the world of social networking, including from TikTok and Apple’s iMessage.
On Wednesday, he said Meta’s addition of a short-video feature known as Reels to Instagram and Facebook was in large part a response to TikTok’s rise. Users continue to engage more on TikTok than with his apps, he said.
“TikTok is still bigger than either Facebook or Instagram, and I don’t like it when our competitors do better than us,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
Judge James Boasberg, who is presiding over the case in the US district court for the District of Columbia, must decide whether Meta broke the law. The government plans to seek a break-up of the company if it wins.
The government’s case could be challenging to prove, legal experts have said, partly because it seeks to unwind mergers that were approved by regulators years ago. Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, and WhatsApp two years later for $19 billion.
[ Zuckerberg says Meta has more competitors than FTC claimsOpens in new window ]
The FTC’s case against Meta is the latest tech antitrust lawsuit to go to trial and could help set precedent for other cases. Last year, the Justice Department won its antitrust case against Google for monopolising internet search. A federal judge is set to hear arguments over remedies, including a potential break-up, next week.
The department also completed a separate trial against Google over accusations that it monopolised ad technology, which a federal judge is still deciding.
The justice department has also sued Apple, and the FTC has sued Amazon, accusing the companies of antitrust violations.
Mr Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, is the government’s marquee witness and was called first to the stand on Monday. Lawyers for the FTC presented him with binders full of dated emails and internal communications about his acquisition strategy.
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One of his emails, from 2018, suggested that he knew Meta needed to prepare for antitrust concerns. “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote.
In court on Tuesday, he said, “I just wanted to be mindful that we should have a strategy that is creating the most value for the people we’re trying to serve, taking into account the direction that the politics seemed to be telling you at that time.”
Legal experts said the FTC’s volume of internal communication evidence was compelling.
“These documents are exactly what the government needed,” said Kenneth Dintzer, partner at Crowell & Moring and the former lead attorney in the government’s successful antitrust case against Google. “From Zuckerberg’s own mouth, the documents showed he had an interest back then to buy a competitor.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
