Mark Zuckerberg has known for years that this week could come.
In court on Tuesday, Federal Trade Commission attorney Daniel Matheson asked the Meta CEO to explain an email he sent executives in 2018 warning of “a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyways.”
“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 going at that time,” Zuckerberg responded.
His prediction is playing out now. Zuckerberg has taken the stand this week, testifying against the government’s claim that Meta has been illegally building a social media monopoly. Less clear is how the politics of today will impact the future of this case.
The case dates back to President Donald Trump’s first administration, a time when conservatives were latching on to antitrust arguments against tech giants they believed were censoring right-wing voices. Under President Joe Biden, the FTC’s former chair, Lina Khan, pursued an aggressive anti-monopoly agenda. Khan warned Monday that the potential for Trump to interfere in the case is “a constant worry that we all need to stay very vigilant about.”
This landmark trial, which is likely to go on for months, has the potential to restructure the U.S. social media market, as the FTC seeks to have Meta divest from Instagram and WhatsApp to increase competition. It’s also a test of the extent that Trump could attempt to inject himself in antitrust matters, especially when it comes to tech executives who have worked to curry favor with him.
Zuckerberg is among those executives. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg rolled back content moderation policies that were unpopular with Trump and Republicans. He went to the inauguration, has also repeatedly met with Trump in the White House and at Mar-a-Lago, and even bought a house in Washington. It has been reported that the CEO attempted to lobby Trump into reaching a settlement with the FTC.
Within the last month, Trump has fired the two Democratic commissioners at the FTC and is questioning the legal basis of the agency’s independence, a challenge that is likely to reach the Supreme Court.
When asked if he would be against a settlement with Meta, Andrew Ferguson, the FTC’s chair, said he would respect any official order coming from the Trump administration.
“The president’s head of the executive branch, and I think it’s important for me to obey lawful orders,” Ferguson said at a tech policy event. “The President recognizes that we’ve got to enforce the laws, so I’d be very surprised if anything like that ever happened.”
In the courtroom Tuesday, however, Zuckerberg experienced the full force of the government’s case.
“It is fair to say,” Matheson asked Zuckerberg, “that due to the fact that Instagram and Facebook are both controlled by Meta, their content moderation policies are basically the same, their data privacy and practices are basically the same and their advertising load is controlled in ways that only benefit the family of apps rather than each individual app, right?”
“I think that’s right, although, you know, characterized quite negatively,” Zuckerberg responded.
Over the past two days, the FTC’s legal team has been attempting to argue that since 2011, Meta has maintained a monopoly over the social networking market by buying competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp that threatened Facebook’s user base. The government alleges Meta has stifled competition in data privacy, content access and advertising.
Meta’s legal team argues that it is simply a competitor adapting to a crowded market in the attention economy, actively competing with video, microblogging, messaging and artificial intelligence platforms.
The FTC’s legal team is pointing to companies like Snapchat, which Meta tried to purchase in 2013, as it argues that Meta has displayed a pattern of anticompetitive behavior. This week they’ve asked Zuckerberg to discuss emails he sent a decade ago about his company’s competition.
“What we’re really buying here is time. If some new competitor springs up buying Instagram,” Zuckerberg wrote to his team in a 2012 email, “now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.”
Later that year, after the company tried and failed to develop a photo app to compete with Instagram, Meta bought it for $1 billion, a sale that at the time was approved by the FTC.
In 2013, Meta tried and failed to buy Snapchat after it launched Stories, a feature that allowed Snapchat users to share pictures with their followers that disappeared after 24 hours.
“I delivered the offer to Evan and he seemed to take it well,” Zuckerberg emailed Meta leadership about discussions with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. “At this point, we should probably prepare for it to leak that we offered $6b for them and all the negative that will come from that.” (Meta would not add a similar feature to Instagram until 2016.)
Then, in 2013, Matheson argued that Meta acquired WhatsApp because it was concerned that the messaging service’s growing user base could compete with Facebook’s if it implemented social media features like other popular Asian competitors like WeChat or Lime.
“I believe his teams are executing well technically but their results this year are only okay so far. Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy it for $1B,” Zuckerberg wrote in a 2013 email to his team.
All of these instances, Zuckerberg explained, were a result of the state of Meta at the time. According to him, Meta was a fast-growing brand that was interested in acquiring interesting and exciting products with the intention of helping the company reach a larger user base, provide expertise and engineering support and keep the products as individual brands.
Zuckerberg also testified that “TikTok, YouTube, iMessage” are Meta’s biggest competition.
If U.S. District Judge James Boasberg finds that Meta has maintained a monopoly, the company may be forced to sell off businesses key to its revenue structure.
Such a decision would also illuminate tensions within the Republican Party over antitrust matters. Khan’s aggressive tactics had admirers in Trumpworld, including Vice President JD Vance and Steve Bannon. But Trump’s posture toward Zuckerberg and the FTC indicates a departure from that kind of approach.
The trial is expected to last two months.
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Samuel Larreal is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.