Meta saw TikTok as ‘highly urgent’ threat, Zuckerberg says at antitrust trial

Mark Zuckerberg said Tiktok from Bytedance Ltd. It has put a “very urgent” competitive threat to Meta Platforms Inc. When it first appeared in 2018, where he witnessed for a third day in the anti -monopoly experience affiliated with the Federal Trade Committee.

“We have noticed that our growth slowed down,” said Meta CEO on Wednesday. “It was very urgent, this has been a top priority for the company for several years.”

Zuckerberg spent seven hours over the past two days interrogating it by a government lawyer, who pressed him to reconsider the struggle for the company – then Facebook Inc. To keep pace with the mutation of mobile phone applications in the previous contract. This led to the company’s purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp for more than 10 years, in response to Tiktok, its Instagram video products are released in 2020.

FTC wants to force Meta to sell applications because it tries to draw Zuckerberg as a shrewd executive manager who monopolizes an illegal part of the social media market by buying companies instead of competing with them. In response to Mita Mark Hansen’s lawyer, he can tell his story without a reaction.

Zuckerberg said: “People will participate in new ways five years ago, what is happening today,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that Meta is competing with a set of platforms, including Google’s Youtube, and IMessage from Apple Inc. Likewise, Elon Musk’s X, Telegram and Microsoft Corp. LinkedIn and others. FTC emphasizes that in the narrow market to share information with friends and family, Meta only competes with Snap Snapchat.

“Network effects”

Part of the FTC case includes the technical concept of “network effects”, which means that the more companies of companies such as Meta, the more likely to keep a dominant situation, because it is unlikely that people will turn into a service used by a few people.

The American boycott judge James Boasberg, who heads the unpopular trial in Washington, remained greatly silent during the interrogation, but he entered during the Zuckerberg testimony on Wednesday to ask whether the effects of the network are still really important.

“How much does it matter if your friends are on a specific platform if you can send content from this basic system? Why does it matter if your friends are there?” The judge said.

Zuckerberg said it was not. “These applications are now primarily as discovery engines,” he said. “People can take this content to the messaging engines.”

If FTC prevails, one of Instagram and WhatsApp will decrease years of integration between applications, which disrupts two most popular digital consumer products in the world, and perhaps eradicating hundreds of billions of dollars in the market value of Meta. It also raises serious questions about how the government is evaluated and agreed upon.

Akbar company

Under the interrogation of Hansen, Zuckerberg refuted the FTC argument that Mita bought Instagram for a competitor. He said that Instagram could not have been able to grow to the extent that it was, if he remained independent. “Instagram has been built in a more vibrant service,” Zuckerberg said.

He said that taking a small online platform to one billion users and beyond is unlikely to happen without the support of a larger company. He said: “Every company has this level of size owned by a larger company.”

It appeared earlier in the experiment that Snap rejected a $ 6 billion offer of Facebook in 2013, and Zuckerberg said that the service would have grown more if it had joined his company.

Sometimes the interrogation earlier this week by FTC Daniel Mattheckon’s lawyer, Zuckerberg sought to back down from the data made in previous internal communication.

Zuckerberg admitted in a 2013 email that prevents ads on Facebook for messaging applications WeChat, Kakao and Line, written by “Trying to build social networks to replace us.” However, in the situation this week, he said, “It is difficult for me to describe what their intention was.”

When he asked Hansen to describe how the competitive threat posed by Instagram and others at the time of deals, he referred to a quotation from the former CEO of Intel Corp, saying “only alive with great greatness.”

Matheson also sought to show that Meta, then known as Facebook Inc. , She was aware of the risks of fighting monopoly for years, including potential separation.

It has been offered an e -mail from 2018 in which Zuckerberg wrote: “With the growth of calls to dismantle major technology companies, there is an unsuccessful opportunity to give us forcing Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5 to 10 years in any case.”

This story was originally shown on Fortune.com

2025-04-16 20:37:00