(Bloomberg / Josh Sisco and Kurt Wagner) – The Federal Commission of Commerce of the United States is finally having its day in court against Meta Platforms Inc., arguing that the company must be broken to illegally monopolize the purchase of the social networks market.
The openness of the good of the FTC in Washington before the main judge James Boasberg in a case that has spent years in process. The agency’s lawyers began their arguments invoking a long tradition of the United States to try to guarantee a competitive market, one that the main litigating lawyer of the FTC, Daniel Matheson, accused the goal of or rape.
“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted that companies must compete if they want to succeed,” Matheson said in his opening statement. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”
If the FTC prevails, a Spin -FFF of Instagram and WhatsApp would undo years of integration between the applications, it would interrupt two of the most popular digital consumption products in the world and potentially erase hungry for billions of billions of billions of dollars of market value. It would also ask serious questions about how the government evaluates and addresses the agreements.
The company is prepared to counteract its defense later on Monday. The trial is expected to last two months and testimony of functions as soon as this week of executive director Mark Zuckerberg and former executive Sheryl Sandberg.
The president of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, was in the courtroom for the opening of the trial. The earlier Monday, while warning about regulation, he told Fox Business “Antimonopoly laws can help make sure no private sector company becomes so powerful that it affects our lives in a really bad way for all Americans.”
A final decision will depend on how social networks are defined and if Meta dominates that market. The FTC will focus on people who communicate with friends and family, which calls the “personal social media services” market, which according to him is mainly composed of shared messages and media between nearby contacts.
The FTC argues that Instagram and WhatsApp’s goal purchases are “murderous acquisitions” that prevented these competitions from competing. To support your case that goal is a monopoly, the FTC will argue that the quality of its applications has decreased, most ads with advertisements and privacy protections woke up.
In 2010 “Meta faced a maritime change in competitive conditions,” said Matheson, referring to the growing mobile market. “They decided that the competition was too difficult and it would be easier to buy from their rivals than to compete with them.”
Meta bought WhatsApp partly at the FEND offer of Alphabet Inc. Google was also considering buying the company, according to Matheson. And Meta also considered buying Snap Inc. for $ 6 billion in 2013, he thought that Snapchat owner rejected the offer. The number was not previously known, since the reports at that time linked discussions such as half.
SNAP representatives did not immediately respond to a comment request on Monday.
In his initial argument, Matheson said that the FTC will highlight the emails of “smoking gun” of the executive goal, including Zuckerberg, particularly one of 2012, where he described the Instagram agreement as a way to “neutralize a competitor.”
After Meta bought Instagram, “the experience” offered by the service, said Matheson, allowing him to avoid cannibalizing his own most profitable Facebook product. While that is a “rational commercial decision,” Matheson said “offends politics” or antimonopoly laws.
Meta has aggressively backed up against FTCS’s claims, arguing that it competes intensely with a variety of platforms, including Tiktok by Bytedance Ltd., Snap Snapchat, Google YouTube, Image E Elder’s Image and Ely.
The agency says that Snapchat only competes with goal, and that a series of other tight competitors, including Myspace, are now missing.
The FTC can have a difficult time in court. Althegh Boasberg denied the finishing motion to throw the case in November, he said that “prevailing here, however, it does not obscure the fact that the commission faces difficult questions about whether their claims can be maintained in the melting pot.”
Meta also argues that the FTC had the opportunity to challenge offers, for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and allowed them to process.
The FTC opened an investigation on Meta in 2019 Dering the first Trump administration and sued the company in December 2020. The former president of the FTC, Lina, under the Biden administration, advanced the case, which is now in the hands of Ferguson, who was in Redeby Donald Trump.
The case will prove the capacity of the government for police competence in the technological sector that moves rapidly, which has evolved significantly. Since 2019, Musk bought Twitter Inc., Tiktok became one of the most dominant social media applications in the world, and Meta launched rival products to compete with both theme.
(Updates with FTC lawyer that begin in the second paragraph).
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