The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Andrew Ferguson pronounces the start of the agency’s antitrust case against Meta and describes in detail the deregulation program of the Trump administration.
Meta Mark Zuckerberg He appeared on Monday in a federal court to testify the first day of a breakthrough antitrust case against his company – one which accuses Zuckerberg and other higher management of illegal purchase of smaller applications, similar to Instagram and WhatsApp to create a monopoly on social media.
The lawyers of the Federal Trade Committee said on Monday that they might try to prove that in a weekly dissertation Instagram purchased and WhatsApp as a part of the so -called “Buy or burying” strategy used to compensate for competition and alternatives, especially from the application, which she considered a threat to their platform.
“They decided that the competition is too difficult and it would be easier to buy their rivals than to compete with them,” said FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson on Monday.
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The house of E. Barrett Prettiman USA is seen as a court of Appeal in the USA in Washington. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
He argued that for over a decade the strategy was allowed to buy competition with much above the market value-tanning the so-called “entrance barriers” in order to protect their dominance in social media.
Matheson and FTC accuse the finish line of using a monopoly strategy to the so -called “personal social networks” market.
If it succeeds, FTC will probably strive to order the meta restructuring of the company or the sale of purchased firms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Victory could be a noteworthy victory for the federal government at a time when he fought for victory in court challenges with the participation of the Silicon Valley and the complex start-up network that balloled, seemingly overnight in the predominant firms.
The finish line is now value USD 1.4 trillion. If FTC lawyers won the antitrust laws against the finish line, it might be the largest solution of the American company, since the government had a breakdown of AT&T in the early eighties.
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Mark Zuckerberg, general director of Meta Platforms Inc., Center, arrives at the sixtieth Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington, USA, on Monday, January 20, 2025. (Shawn THEW/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Despite the long tail of the lawsuit, which is anticipated to play in the Federal Court in early summer, FTC lawyers didn’t waste on Monday, calling their first witness, general director of Meta Marek Zuckerberg, as a position.
There, Zuckerberg was grilled by E -Maile, which he sent on the purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, respectively in 2012 and 2014.
In E -Mail from 2012, Zuckerberg said that Instagram had recorded such rapid development that his own company had to buy it in Matheson’s story.
“This is e -mail written by someone who found Instagram as a threat and was forced to sacrifice a billion dollars, because the finish could not fulfill this threat through the competition,” said Matheson.
He also fought questions on the transformation of Facebook, which FTC noticed, comes as a site designed to facilitate calls between peers with one which presented more content of third pages, including news and group activities.
“Over time, part of” interest “, which built more than a part of” friend “,” said Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg said that users are actually “related to a much larger number of groups and other types of things” compared to previous days.
“Part of the” friend “has fallen a bit – but it is still something we care about,” he said.
Jason Citron, CEO Discord, Evan Spiegel, CEO SNAP, Shou ZI Chew, CEO Tiktok, Linda Yaccarino, CEO X and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Spict, once they testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2024. (Alex Wong / Getty Images / Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the meta lawyer, Mark Hansen, tried to reject the case in his comments opening the “bag” of the FTC theory “in the war with the law.”
“The facts will prove that all FTC theories are wrong,” Hansen told us Judge James BoasbergJudge chairman in the trial.
Meta lawyers tried to challenge the FTC description of the so-called “personal social networks” applications and argued that their pool of competitors is definitely much greater-extending to firms, including Tiktok, LinkedIn and others.
During the interrogation, Boasberg listened rigorously and made notes, sometimes interfering with questions or ask about additional details.
The trial on the bench can be settled by one judge – Judge Boasberg in this case – and is to last about eight weeks.
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Later this week, it is anticipated that the court will consider META from other former officials, with witnesses, including former operational director Sheril Sandberg, former technology director Andrew Bosworth and others.
