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Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in emails that he considered separating Instagram from Meta, a US federal court heard on Tuesday in an antitrust trial that raises existential questions for the technology giant.
In a confidential 2018 email presented as evidence by the US Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, Zuckerberg told top Meta executives that as “calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next five to 10 years”.
Even “if we wanted to keep the apps together we may not be able to”, he added.
Zuckerberg’s fears about Washington’s bipartisan pushback against Big Tech appear to have been prescient. The FTC this week began making its case that the social media group is an illegal monopoly in a trial that may result in a forced break-up of the $1.5tn tech juggernaut.
The antitrust regulator, which has pledged to continue its crack down on Big Tech in Donald Trump’s second presidency, has accused Meta of quashing nascent competition by buying up rivals Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 for $1bn and $19bn respectively, and has asked for the deals to be unwound. The company has rejected the claims.
Zuckerberg’s 2018 email was written as Meta was weighing whether — and how — to reorganise the company following the two acquisitions. It also debated whether Instagram’s growth could trigger a “network collapse” of what was at the time its more profitable Facebook platform.
“Given our concern about these effects, we have reduced our promotions from Facebook to Instagram,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email.
When asked about the email in court, the Meta founder said at the time the group was addressing the “operational difficulties” of managing the different apps, with Facebook being saddled with the responsibility of helping Instagram grow.
“We were lopsided in terms of how we were managing the company at the time,” he told the court.
According to the 2018 email, this pushed Zuckerberg to “wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company”.
He wrote the move could help “accomplish a number of important goals”, including having teams be less codependent as they built apps and to “immediately stop artificially growing Instagram in a way that undermines the Facebook networks”.
This could also help “retain [Instagram founder] Kevin [Systrom] to make sure Instagram can do its best work”, Zuckerberg said in the email.
Systrom left the group in September 2018, as Facebook asserted greater control over Instagram. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While “most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up”, Zuckerberg said in the 2018 email.
When asked by the FTC lawyer to elaborate on “corporate history”, the Meta boss said he could not recall details.
“I’m not saying we should actually do this now,” Zuckerberg added in the email. “But as we consider it, we should keep in mind that there’s a real chance that all our work to build a family of apps may be something we don’t get to keep”.
Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy in San Francisco
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