Read what Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Execs said about Instagram before you buy it

The first week of Antitrust test They brought new revelations about how the company, previously known as Facebook, approached the competitive threat represented by Instagram in early 2010.

The US Government blames Meta for breaching competition laws by gaining companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp, which threatens Monopoly on Facebook. If the lawyers of the Federal Committee on US Trade (FTC) are successful, the government may force META to interrupt its business by selling Instagram and WhatsApp.

As part of the process, FTC shared convincing evidence to demonstrate that Facebook is very aware of the risk created for its business as the photo sharing app has increased popularity. In documents containing Facebook internal emails, Facebook performs FRET for Instagram growth and discusses how much to pay for the app if Facebook acquires it.

The company also implements other strategies to limit the growth of Instagram, including the copying of its functionality and the launch of its own application or buying the application, and then no longer adds new functions to it while working on its own products.

Facebook’s strategy either to buy or bury its competition in these conversations, according to the government’s arguments. In addition to showing how the company thought of its competition at the time, messages are indicative of leakage strategies that have allowed Meta Begemot on the social network today.

Some of the highlights of these messages are below.

Mark Zuckerberg and others are worried about the rapid growth of Instagram

• “Instagram seems to be growing fast. After 4 months, they are up to 2 million users and 30K daily photos. It’s a lot. We need to follow this closely. Also, obviously the next big Dropbox boost will be in sharing photos.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2011
• “If Instagram continues to kick the ass of mobile devices or if Google bought, then in the next few years they could easily add pieces of their service that copy what we do now, and if they have an increasing number of people’s photos, then this is a real problem for us, they will already develop. – There is no reason to use them. Mark Zuckerberg, September 2011
• “The Photos Team is now Focused Almost Exclusively on a New Mobile Photo App As We Gawk at Instagram’s Simple Photo-Sharing App Taking Off (and event +5.3 W/W).S” – Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer, February 2011.
• “The trend is that a huge number of people use Instagram every day-including all, ranging from non-technical friends in high school to even FB employees, they upload only some of their photos to FB. This creates a huge hole for us and the one we are sure to do on the platform or with social dynamics.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012

Facebook considers the acquisition of Instagram, stopping its development and growth

• “I wonder if we have to think about buying Instagram, even if it costs ~ 500 m. At the moment they seem to have two things we don’t do: a really good camera and a photo -centered sharing network.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012

• “I think it is quite possible that our original thesis is wrong and theirs is right – that what people want is more to take the best photos than to put them on FB … We may want to think about paying a lot of money for it.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
• “In fact, I think we need to make a serious argument that we have to buy a path, Pinterest, Instagram, Evernote and anyone, we really admire/do great things right now if (1) we can structure it. And we think we think we can lock them to process them.
• “I think what we would do is support their product to work and simply not add more functions to it and focus future development on our products, including building all their camera functions in ours. By killing their products, we prevent us from being able to make it up and we make no one to make someone on the market immediately. – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
• “One way to look at this is that what we really buy is time. Even if some new competitors (SIC), buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. Now it will give us a year or more to integrate our dynamics before someone approaches their scale again.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012