Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram as a separate company in 2018, anticipating possible antitrust scrutiny, according to internal documents revealed during a high-profile antitrust trial in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
The document, shown on Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony, revealed the tech executive’s early concerns about growing calls to break up major tech firms. “I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company,” Zuckerberg wrote in a memo at the time. “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.”
The trial, brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is aimed at unwinding Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp—moves the agency argues were part of a broader “buy or bury” strategy to eliminate competition and secure monopoly power in the social media space.
Zuckerberg admitted during testimony that Instagram had a better camera app than what Facebook was developing internally at the time of the acquisition. “We were doing a build vs. buy analysis,” he said. “I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.” This admission could bolster the FTC’s claims that Meta targeted Instagram not just as an investment, but to neutralise a growing threat.
The FTC argues that Meta has maintained an illegal monopoly over platforms where people connect with friends and family, pointing to limited viable alternatives like Snapchat and smaller networks such as MeWe. It also contests Meta’s defence that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit serve as meaningful competitors, saying those cater to different user behaviour and content-sharing styles.
Meta’s legal team has countered that the FTC has wrongly defined the market and overlooked serious competition from newer players, particularly TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage.
Zuckerberg also pushed back on the claim that Meta’s dominance has enabled it to reduce app quality by flooding users with ads. He insisted that more advertising doesn’t necessarily degrade the user experience. “Ads on our apps have improved,” he said, adding that the system shows more ad content to users who are more likely to engage with it.
Under questioning, he even acknowledged that Meta had at times discussed the idea of launching an ad-only feed. “I think we have discussed it at different points, but I don’t think we have done it,” he said.
In defending Meta’s acquisition strategy, Zuckerberg highlighted the challenges of in-house innovation. “Building a new app is hard, and many more times than not, when we have tried to build a new app, it hasn’t gotten a lot of traction,” he said. “We probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company, and the majority of them don’t go anywhere.”
The FTC’s case, originally filed during President Donald Trump’s first term, is widely viewed as a critical test of the US government’s resolve to regulate Big Tech. With Zuckerberg’s testimony revealing internal deliberations, the trial continues to shine a light on how Meta grew into a digital empire—and whether it did so at the expense of fair competition.
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