Former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg testified in a landmark antitrust case Wednesday that the company considered blocking advertisements from emerging competitors on Facebook.
Sandberg was quizzed amid claims by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to squash competition and establish an illegal monopoly to maintain its dominance in the social media market.
Facebook bought Instagram, a photo-sharing app with no ads, for $1 billion in 2012, while two years later, it purchased the messaging app WhatsApp for $22 billion.
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Sandberg acknowledged that Meta considered blocking ads from competing platforms on Facebook, such as Google Plus, KakaoTalk and LINE. She was questioned about a 2011 message she sent to staffers after Google launched Google Plus in which she called Google Plus “real competition.”
During testimony on Wednesday, she characterized the comment as motivation for her team and not as an admission of market threat.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that he bought Instagram and WhatsApp because he saw value in the companies and not to take out competitors.
In a 2012 private discussion between Zuckerberg and Sandberg, Sandberg expressed skepticism about Instagram’s $1 billion price tag, a stance she now admits was incorrect.
“I think I was wrong. I think I was very wrong,” Sandberg testified.
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Seeking to explain messages in which he worried that Instagram was a competitive threat, Zuckerberg said the app’s camera was simply better than camera features Meta had developed.
“We were doing a build vs. buy analysis” while in the process of building a camera app, Zuckerberg said. “I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
The comments appeared to bolster FTC claims that Meta chose to buy out rivals rather than compete. Meta argues that Zuckerberg’s motivations do not matter because it does not have a monopoly.
Zuckerberg also said that it was his job to understand what is going on in such a competitive industry. He is expected to hinge on defining the market in which Meta operates and assessing whether its acquisitions have benefited consumers.
Meta lawyer Mark Hansen said during his opening statement that Meta and its apps cannot be considered an unfair monopoly if users do not have to spend even a cent for their services.
Additionally, with TikTok and YouTube included, Meta’s share of the market drops below 30%, Meta has argued.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg is presiding over the case, having denied Meta’s request for a summary judgment last year and ruling that the case must go to trial.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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