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The Chief Executive Officer of Meta said on Wednesday, “We saw that our growth slowed down dramatically.” “It was highly necessary, it has been the top priority for the company over the years.”
Zuckerberg is being questioned by a government prosecutor in the last two days, who pressured him to see the struggle for the company again – then Facebook Inc. – to live with a mobile app boom in the last decade. More than 10 years ago, the company’s Instagram and WhatsApp purchased and, in response to Tikok, roll out of its reels video product for Instagram in 2020.
FTC wants to force Meta to sell apps as it tries to portray Zuckerberg as a clever executive, which instead of competing with them, bought companies and illegally monopolized the social media market. Now, in responding to his lawyer Mark Hansen, he can tell his story without pushbacks.
Zuckerberg said, “People will share new ways in five years, which is happening today.”
Zuckerberg said that the meta competes with an array of platform, with Google’s YouTube, and Apple Inc. The IMESSAGE of X, but x, Telegram, Microsoft Corp. LinkedIn and others are also included. FTC says that in the narrow market to share information with friends and family, Meta competes only with Snapchat of Snap Inc.
FTCs include the technical concept of “network effects”, which means that more user companies such as meta are more likely to have more likely to maintain a major condition, as people are unlikely to switch to the service used by some people.
US District Judge James Boseberg, who is presiding over the non-jurish test in Washington, remained quiet during interrogation, but on Wednesday during Zuckerberg’s testimony to ask whether the network effects still really matter.
“If your friends are on a particular platform then how much does it matter if you can send material from that platform? So why does it matter if you have friends?” The judge said.
Zuckerberg said that it is not. “These apps now mainly serve as the Discovery Engine,” he said. “People can take that material to a messaging engine.”
If the FTC prevails, a spinoff apps of Instagram and WhatsApp will undo the years of integration between apps, will disrupt two of the most popular digital consumer products in the world and will eradicate hundreds of billions of dollars to the market price of the meta. It will also raise serious questions as to how the government evaluates and approval the deals.
In a militant interrogation by FTC lawyer Daniel Mathenson several times earlier this week, Zuckerberg demanded to return the statements made in the previous internal communication.
Zuckerberg admitted in an 2013 email that advertising advertisements on Facebook for messaging apps, Kakao and line on Facebook, which he wrote, “Trying to create social networks to change us.” At the stand this week, however, he said that “it is difficult for me what his intention was.”
Hansen was asked to explain how he was evaluating the competitive threat generated by Instagram and others at the time of deals, referring to a quotation of Endy Grove, former Intel Corp CEO and Grove, saying “Paranoid is alive only.”
Mathason also demanded to show that the meta, known as Facebook Inc., was aware of its antitrust risk years ago, including a possible breakup, showing an email from 2018 when Zuckerberg wrote: “Such as calls to break up big technology companies, a non-discarded possibility that we would be forced to spin out in the next 5-10 years.”
Such more stories are available Bloomberg.com
