The future of the Meta social media emporium begins to decide this Monday in the United States; Specifically in Washington DC, in a trial in which the Federal Commerce Commission (FTC) of the country aspires to break the bouquet of applications held by Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook would remain in the hands of the firm, which would have to look for a buyer for Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC accuses the technological of having built over the years an illegal monopoly of social networks by spending billions in applications developed by the competition, which would have allowed the company to take control of most of the tools that, to this day, use users from all over the world to communicate and express themselves.
Goal (until three years Facebook) bought the platform to share Instagram photographs for one billion dollars in 2012. Approximately two years later, the company did the same with the chat WhatsApp tool, in this case for approximately 22 billion dollars. And along the way, he also made movements to get other tools such as Snapchat, which, finally, did not crystallize. For the FTC these agreements would have caused the company to become a digital monopoly, something that would go against the interests of the users themselves. Meta, evidently, denies it.
“It is absurd that the FTC is trying to dismantle a large American company at the same time that the administration tries to save Tiktok, from Chinese property,” He pointed out Last Friday in a statement in the official Meta Jennifer Newstead blog, legal head of the company. In the statement, Newstead also pointed out that “in reality, more time is spent on Tiktok and YouTube than on Facebook or Instagram: if only Tiktok and YouTube are included in the definition of FTC Social Network Market, goal has a market share of less than 30%.”
Be that as it may, a potential rupture would be a major problem. If the company is forced for a sale of its applications, its income would be seriously affected, since, according to estimates collected by ‘Reuters’, the firm obtains approximately half of its advertising income in the United States of Instagram.
The trial is expected to be dilated over time until next July. If the FTC wins, it must demonstrate in a second trial that measures such as forcing the goal to sell Instagram or WhatsApp would restore competition. Decide what the judge decides the time, and with the foreseeable appeals that will be when the ruling arrives, both WhatsApp and Instagram will continue to be property owned in the medium term.
