Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta, took the witness stand on Wednesday in a landmark antitrust trial, batting back assertions by government lawyers that the social network tried to illegally quash competition.
Lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission pressed Ms. Sandberg, who was second in command from 2008 to 2022, to explain an email she sent more than a decade ago saying the launch of the now-defunct Google Plus social network was the “first time we have real competition and consumers have real choice.”
On Wednesday, she said she had been rallying troops scared of a new rival.
“We had never had a full copy of our product before,” Ms. Sandberg said. “That was very scary for us.”
She began testifying after Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, concluded his three days on the stand as the government’s marquee witness in its case, Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms.
The government has accused the company, previously known as Facebook, of acquiring the social media apps Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups in a “buy-or-bury strategy” to snuff out competition. Meta’s core function is connecting friends and family, making Snapchat its only serious social media competitor, the F.T.C. has said.
Mr. Zuckerberg countered during his roughly 10 hours of testimony this week that Meta faced significant competition from companies including TikTok, YouTube and Apple’s iMessage. Buying Instagram and WhatsApp was business as usual for a tech company, he said.
Meta’s addition of a short-video feature, known as Reels, to Instagram and Facebook was in large part a response to TikTok’s rise. Users continue to engage more on TikTok than with his apps, Mr. Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.
“TikTok is still bigger than either Facebook or Instagram, and I don’t like it when our competitors do better than us,” he said.
Judge James E. Boasberg, who is presiding over the case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, must decide whether Meta broke the law. The government plans to seek a breakup of the company if it wins.
The government’s case could be challenging to prove, legal experts have said, partly because it seeks to unwind mergers that were approved by regulators years ago. Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and, two years later, WhatsApp for $19 billion.
The F.T.C.’s case against Meta is the latest tech antitrust lawsuit to go to trial and could help set precedent for other cases. Last year, the Justice Department won its antitrust case against Google for monopolizing internet search. A federal judge is set to hear arguments over remedies, including a potential breakup, next week. The department also completed a separate trial against Google over accusations that it monopolized ad technology, which a federal judge is still deciding.
The Justice Department has also sued Apple, and the F.T.C. has sued Amazon, accusing the companies of antitrust violations.
In a friendly exchange led by lawyers for Meta on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, said changes in the social media market were “extremely dynamic.”
“What’s that Andy Grove quote? ‘Only the paranoid survive,’” Mr. Zuckerberg said, referring to an often-quoted leadership mantra by a former head of Intel. “It’s my job to understand things that are adjacent to us and what’s going on in the industry.”
He also said Instagram would probably not have achieved the same success without Meta’s resources. Bigger tech companies provide engineering and tech infrastructure resources, exploding growth, he said.
“So could I say it was impossible without? No, obviously not,” he said. “But does it seem like it would be likely? I think extremely not.”
Mr. Zuckerberg also disputed the F.T.C.’s argument that Meta acquired WhatsApp because it feared the messaging app could add more features and become a competitor.
The founders of WhatsApp always wanted to keep the app focused on messaging, he said. “If anything, once they joined, I basically ended up pushing to add things,” he added.
On Monday, lawyers for the F.T.C. presented Mr. Zuckerberg with binders full of dated emails and internal communications about his acquisition strategy.
One of his emails, from 2018, suggested that he knew that Meta needed to prepare for antitrust concerns. “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 5-10 years anyway,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.
In court on Tuesday, he said, “I just wanted to be mindful that we should have a strategy that is creating the most value for the people we’re trying to serve, taking into account the direction that the politics seemed to be telling you at that time.”
Legal experts said the F.T.C.’s volume of internal communication evidence was compelling.
“These documents are exactly what the government needed,” said Kenneth Dintzer, partner at Crowell & Moring and the former lead attorney in the government’s successful antitrust case against Google. “From Zuckerberg’s own mouth, the documents showed he had an interest back then to buy a competitor.”
Cecilia Kang reports on technology and regulatory policy for The Times from Washington. She has written about technology for over two decades.
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley.
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