He has singled out Facebook’s Zuckerberg for
scorn, calling him “a real problem.”
Instagram and WhatsApp are among some
70 companies that Facebook has acquired
over the past 15 years. But they are the ones
most frequently held up by Facebook critics as
properties that should be split off.
Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram,
bolstering the social network’s business a
month before its stock went public. At the time,
the photo-sharing app had about 30 million
users and wasn’t producing any revenue. A few
years later, Facebook acquired WhatsApp, an
encrypted messaging service, for $19 billion.
Zuckerberg vowed both companies would
be run independently, but over the years the
services have become increasingly integrated.
Users are now able to link accounts and share
content across the platforms. Instagram now
has more than 1 billion users worldwide. Such
integration could make it more difficult to break
off the companies.
NetChoice, a Washington trade association that
includes Facebook as a member, quickly panned
the lawsuits. The case for antitrust enforcement
against Facebook “has never been weaker,”
NetChoice vice president Carl Szabo said in a
statement, pointing to newer social services
such as TikTok and Snapchat as rivals that could
“overtake” older platforms.
“These lawsuits mark an important turning point
in the battle to rein in Big Tech monopolies and
to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement,” said Alex
Harman, competition policy advocate for Public
Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group.