If the FTC wins, Instagram may be spun off from Meta’s “family of apps,” which the FTC believes would, for the first time ever, force Meta to face competition as a social media company focused on connecting friends and family.
Some critics think that Meta has never really had rivals. Back in 2012, Zuckerberg claimed in his talk with the Startup School that Facebook had no beef with MySpace, for example, which crumpled in the face of Facebook’s competition. Instead, he insisted that for Facebook, “it’s not about winning and losing. It’s about doing something that’s valuable.”
But when Zuckerberg tried to claim that there was “more than one” social network in 2012, the Startup School interviewer abruptly interrupted him.
“More than one social network? Not really,” the interviewer joked, stirring loud laughter from the audience by pointing out the obvious.
Rather than point to any Facebook rivals, Zuckerberg dodged by saying that Facebook’s integration into a wide range of apps had made nearly everything people did online social.
“My view of the world is almost every product and category is going to get transformed and reimagined to be social,” Zuckerberg said, almost paving the way for Meta’s argument today that it faces vast competition in every direction, including from video apps like YouTube or professional social networks like LinkedIn.
Similarly, at the 2012 TechCrunch conference, Zuckerberg explained that Facebook isn’t about dominating markets but is instead about fulfilling his vision of expanding the way that humans connect in the world.
“We don’t build services to make money,” Zuckerberg said. “We make money to build better services.” And that “really goes to the heart of the philosophy that we have in running the company,” he said. “We exist and we wake up in the morning, and the thing that gets us excited is making a world more open and connected.”
Systrom alleged to the court that, in reality, Zuckerberg ran Facebook based on his personal desire to have his flagship product remain on top. When confronted with an email in which Systrom praised Instagram’s seemingly inevitable integration with Facebook for driving growth, Systrom claimed “he was only emphasizing the benefit to appease Zuckerberg,” The Verge reported, amid rising tensions between the founders. And when Meta’s lawyer asked if that meant he was lying in the email, Systrom appeared to run out of patience for Meta’s line of questioning, responding only with a terse “Sir.”
On X, Benedict joked that for everyone closely watching the testimony from one of the FTC’s star witnesses, it was ” the ‘Sir’ heard round the world.”
