Old emails are chasing Mark Zuckerberg in a high -risk experience

An important part of Mark Zuckerberg’s defense in the most dangerous anti -monopoly challenge in the history of dead this week was not a great relationship with the technology giant and a lot of Tiktok.

In the three -day certificate, the billionaire founder of technology has repeatedly told the US Federal Court in Washington that the Chinese parents ’video platform had grown to become a huge competitor.

The goal of its rival was a goal: canceling the claims of the US Federal Trade Committee Dead Keep an illegal monopoly, accusing that, if it is proven, it can have far -reaching consequences for Zuckerberg’s business more than any commercial threat he faces.

The case is inspected, and Meta can be forced to dismantle its 1.5 -trial collection Zuckerberg She previously pledged to “go to a mat and fight.” Earn, and he will have scored a decisive victory over an organizer who had a long -standing technique in his eyes, and to prosecute the Amazon retail giant.

The trial comes after Zuckerberg failed to negotiate the procedures in the first place. According to a person familiar with the matter, FTC requested $ 30 billion for a possible settlement; Meta Lowbal reached $ 450 million, and then raised its proposal to one billion dollars after the organizer set a floor of $ 18 billion. Then the parties decided to move to the court.

At the heart of the FTC suit, there is a claim that Meta used a “systematic strategy” to eliminate competitors, including by obtaining its Instagram and WhatsApp rivals in 2012 and 2014 for a billion dollars and $ 19 billion, respectively.

FTC lawyers this week provided evidence that Zuckerberg see these emerging requests as a threat, including a set of uncomfortable emails. Zuckerberg agreed in 2012 to suggestions that the Instagram deal may help “neutralize the opponent” and also said he wanted to “use integration and purchases” to create a competitive trench around us on a mobile phone and ads. ”

But it is possible that such tactics are only illegal if FTC can prove that Meta maintains a monopoly, an argument that some anti -monopoly experts say it will be difficult to stack. It is the Zuckerberg point and former head of operations in Meta, Sherrill Sandberg, focused on them in their testimonies, stressing the explosive growth of Techk to serve more than 1 billion users worldwide.

“What they said and thought in the past is not a great appearance, but it has no great constant value – if any – whether Meta is now keeping,” said Paul Swanson, head of the anti -monopoly and competition in Hollande and Hart.

“Zuckerberg and Sandberg did a good job that explains why this is a current fact – (this) Tiktok and Meta have a depletion of each other and alternatives to each other in the minds of most users.”

In anti -monopoly challenges, FTC must also prove that there is harm to consumers, which is usually a monopoly that rises prices. With Meta providing free services, the agency instead argues that consumers have experienced a deteriorating user experience due to the dominance of the platform – advertising filled fodder and poor privacy protection.

The main challenge in FTC will be to persuade James Boasberg, the judge who heads, that Meta has in-partly through the acquisitions-a “personal social work” market that focuses on friends and family’s communications, which does not include Tiktok or Google YouTube.

A person close to the previous settlement negotiations, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal for the first time, said that the football show in Mita showed how weak it was FTC. FTC rejected the comment.

“We were not ashamed to explain the reason for the lack of logical for the Federal Trade Committee to file a case for trial that requires proving something every 17 years in America that it is ridiculous-that Instagram does not compete with Tiktok. We are ready to win the trial.”

But some experts argue that Boasberg, who uttered a few words throughout the week, may receive FTC arguments.

“It is clear that the court is open to the possibility of a personal social networking market,” said Kenneth Dentre, a partner in the Crowell & Moring Group. He pointed to the introduction of the year 2024 in which Boasberg said that FTC had “met its burden to show that other applications are not reasonable alternatives” to the participation of friends and family.

Zuckerberg rejected this idea in court, pointing to the group that rushes to develop short-shaped videos-in response to the height of the meteorite in Tiktok. Zuckerberg said that Tijook’s offer “may have been (most likely) is the highest competitive threat against Instagram and Facebook in the past few years.”

The Meta coach also argued with WhatsApp and Instagram were obtained to accelerate their growth, pointing to the dramatic jump in users after deals.

FTC faced an email for 2013, as Zuckerberg argued before the WhatsApp deal that “the largest competitive carrier for us is that some companies build a reporting application to communicate with small groups of people, then convert it into a wider social network.”

After presenting Sandberg the Settles of Catan Painting game, Zuckerberg said in an email for 2012: “(Facebook) Messenger does not hit WhatsApp, Instagram was so much faster of us to the point that we had to buy it at an amount of one billion dollars … this does not kill it exactly.”

“The confusing part of Mark’s testimony is that he is trying to contradict the statements today that he made a decade ago as these acquisitions were thinking in the actual time,” said Lee Hipner, the chief legal advisor in the American Economic Freedoms project.

Perhaps the most surprising evidence came in the form of Zuckerberg email in 2018, where it is Spinning is considered off Instagram – Quoting the type of threat from the anti -monopoly application it faces today.

He also wrote, “Calls for the dismantling of major technology companies,” he wrote, “There is an unsuccessful opportunity to clarify that we will have to get out of Instagram and possibly WhatsApp in the five years to the next ten years.”