Instagram co-founder supports FTC’s case in landmark Meta monopoly trial – News

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom today testified in the Meta Platforms Inc. antitrust trial, supporting the Federal Trade Commission’s contention that Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram because he saw it as a “threat.”

After then-Facebook Inc. acquired Instagram in 2012, tensions between Zuckerberg and Systrom existed until the latter resigned in 2018. In court today, Systrom explained that part of that antipathy was due to Zuckerberg not allocating enough resources to Instagram once it belonged to Facebook. This supports the FTC’s allegation that the only reason Facebook bought Instagram was because it was a threat and that the acquisition was a “buy-or-bury strategy.”

For six hours at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Systrom contradicted Zuckerberg’s previous testimony that when he bought Instagram and later, WhatsApp, he was not taking his main competitors out of the picture. He said he believes Zuckerberg purchased Instagram and then purposefully put it on the back burner.

“We were by far the fastest-growing team,” Mr. Systrom testified. “We produced the most revenue, and relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt like we should have been much larger.” With Instagram’s one billion users – about 40% of the size of Facebook – the app was only supported by about 1,000 of Facebook’s 35,000 staff. Systrom added that while he was aware that trade-offs are part of the business, he “felt like something else was going on.”

In previous investigations into Meta’s monopoly, company emails revealed that Zuckerberg had indeed once written that prior to the acquisition, he had planned to “neutralize” Instagram as a competitor and that post-acquisition, he would keep Instagram but refrain from adding “more features to it.”

Once acquired, said Systrom, Zuckerberg believed Instagram was negatively affecting Facebook’s growth. “There was dramatic softness in terms of U.S. daily active users and everyone had their theories why,” he said. “Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox [Chief Product Officer] believed it was Instagram’s growth that had by and large contributed to the softness.” Still, on cross-examination, Systrom conceded, “We grew much more quickly because we were part of Facebook than we would have as an independent company.”

On the whole, today’s testimony bolsters the FTC’s case, and its belief that such anticompetitive is justification for Meta being broken up for forced to divest the business. This comes as part of a broader push by the government to break up tech giants, including Google LLC and Amazon.com Inc.

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