The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) lawsuit against Meta, to force the company to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, reached trial this week in a Washington, DC, courtroom.
The case, which was originally filed in December 2018, centres on the FTC’s claim that Meta’s acquisitions of the two apps had created a personal social networking monopoly.
To counter, Meta’s lawyer, Mark Hansen, argued that the FTC’s market definition was artificially narrow, saying that it ignored the influence of platforms like TikTok and iMessage.
During the trial, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was asked whether he had considered selling to MySpace in the early days of Facebook.
He replied that he had not, and that hindsight proved this was the right decision.
This underscored the notion of CEOs and companies always aiming to consider and act on the biggest possible picture, and the longest possible time horizon.