Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement.

Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.

It was a tiny 1 billion dollar acquisition of a company with less than 50 employees. If everyone knew at the time how dominant Instagram would become, that "everyone" sure didn't include the founders and investors in Instagram.

Facebook, wary of someone doing to them what they did to MySpace, was going around buying anyone who might be the next thing. It wasn't necessarily clear that Insta would blow up in the way it did but it was clear that was Facebook's motivation for buying.

Also "tiny 1 billion dollar acquisition" is not how I'd characterize what was the largest acquisition FB had made up to that point: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/...

> Though Facebook is known for smaller acquisitions, Instagram’s surging momentum likely compelled the social network to swiftly put together a billion-dollar offer.

Mira just raised $2B for her company pre-revenue and pre-product.

All funding was lower in 2012, across the board. Moreover, inflation hadn’t skyrocketed, valuations weren’t as foamy, etc.

$1B in 2012 is $1.4B in 2025.

Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2012?amount=10000...