Thilina Kaluthaotage | Nurphoto | Getty images
Meta According to an email presented at Washington, DC Courtroom on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning Instagram in 2018 over concerns about the increasing threat of antitrust litigation against Facebook.
During the second day testimony of Zuckerberg at the Meta’s Antitrest Trial with the Federal Trade Commission, the lawyers representing FTC introduced an email from May 2018, in which Zuckerberg appeared in 2012, commenting on the possibility of separating the photo-sharing app purchased at $ 1 billion.
Zuckerberg wrote in the email, “And I wonder if Instagram is the only structure, which will meet many important goals.” “As the call increases to break the big technical companies, there is a non-unleash chance that we will be forced to exclude Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years. This is another factor we should consider.”
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, when there were 13 employees in the photo app and Zuckerberg was designed to make its company public, at the time, the largest tech IPO on the record. The acquisition of WhatsApp in Instagram and 2014 is in $ 19 billion, which has been closed on Monday and may be last week.
The FTC alleges that the meta monopoly on the social networking market, and argued that the company should not have been able to meet those acquisitions. The agency is demanding to clean the apps from Meta as a possible measure.
Meta disputes the allegations of FTC and claims that the regulator calls the competitive landscape wrong and fails to accept many rivals like Tickk and Apple Not other apps like IMESSAGE and only Snapchat.
Zuckerberg also said in the 2018 email that the company’s “best estimates were independent, it would probably be close to 1 billion today with 300–400 million maps around the size of Twitter or Snapchat. The MAP is small for monthly active people.
Watch: Mark Zuckerberg takes a witness stand on the first day of the antitrust trial.
