Mark Zuckerberg is reported to have lasted a pale offer of only $ 450 million to resolve the FTC Landmark antitrust case that could result in the company’s breakdown.
Zuckerberg made the offer – which was just a portion of $ 30 billion that FTC had requested – during a March call with agency leader Andrew Ferguson, reported Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the issue.
During the call, the Meta chief “seemed confident that President Trump would support him with FTC,” the journal sources said.
Ferguson was blocked on Lowball’s offer and said he would accept nothing less than $ 18 billion and a decree that stops Meta from anti -reompetitive practices.
In response, Zuckerberg increased the offer to nearly $ 1 billion.
But the billionaire was unable to make a deal with FTC and the trial began on Monday as planned – with Zuckerberg as the first witness.
Zuckerberg faced a frying by FTC lawyers for the third direct day on Wednesday while the agency seeks to force meta to rotate Instagram and WhatsApp as a special business.
FTC showed in a previous court, presenting that he would testify longer than any other witnesses.
FTC is claiming that Meta has kept a monopoly on social media firms built about friends and family-Snapchat as his only real competitor and other platforms such as video-based and YouTube based ticks in a particular market.
Federations claim that Zuckerberg used a “Buy or Varros” strategy to win upstarts like Instagram and WhatsApp before they can threaten the company business.
Meta has been pushed back, arguing that he directly competes with Tiktok for the user’s attention.
Meta refused to comment on the reported solution talks. Company spokesman Dani Lever said the company is “ready to win in court”.
“We have not been shy to explain why it makes no sense for FTC to bring a matter to the judgment that requires her to try something every 17-year-old in America knows that she is absurd-Instagram does not compete with Tik,” Lever said in a statement.
Representatives for FTC and White House did not return the comment requests immediately.
Zuckerberg has taken drastic measures to convenience to Trump in recent months – including the unification of other technology leaders to participate in his inauguration and by personally visiting the White House at least three times since January.
During those meetings, he is reported to have pressured Trump to resolve the FTC issue.
A $ 30 billion agreement would be, so far, the largest of its kind in FTC history. In 2019, the agency hit Meta with a record fine of $ 5 billion to violate the intimacy of user data in the Cambridge Analytica Cambridge scandal.
The much smaller bids of Zuckerberg’s resolution showed how weak Meta believes that the FTC issue, a source close to the negotiations, told the post.
Meanwhile, skeptics of great technology in Trump’s orbit have led the president to stay fierce in Meta.
This includes Ferguson, who met with the President at the Oval office on April 8, alongside the new chief of the Department of Justice, Gail Slater and a long Trump ally and antitrust adviser, lawyer Mike Davis. The traffic light was the first to report on the meeting.
During Zuckerberg’s appearance in court on Tuesday, FTC lawyers showed a 2018 document in which he worried about buying Instagram and whether Facebook should be restructured to avoid a federal blow during President Trump’s first term.
“I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of rotating Instagram as a separate company,” Zuckerberg said, according to the document.
“While calls to break down big technology companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to rotate Instagram and maybe WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway,” he added.
Zuckerberg also faced difficult questions about other tobacco weapons emails-including a 2012 exchange in which Zuckerberg acknowledged that former cfo David Ebersman buying Instagram would “effectively neutralize a competitor”.
Facebook bought Instagram for $ 1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for about $ 19 billion in 2014.
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