Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram into a separate company in 2018 due to concerns about increased antitrust pressure, according to an internal document presented during a court case in Washington, Reuters reports.
The document was shown during Zuckerberg's second day of testimony in a high-profile antitrust lawsuit in which the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is demanding the breakup of Meta and the reversal of its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
"I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company," Zuckerberg wrote in an internal letter in 2018. At the time, the company was developing a plan to reorganize and bring its apps closer together.
Despite this, he stressed that merging the apps would likely drive "strong business growth," but warned that it could also reduce the value of Facebook's social network and would not guarantee the survival of the "family of apps" in the long term.
Meta ultimately chose not to spin off Instagram, instead implementing a plan to merge the platforms the following year. But the very existence of such a proposal shows how seriously the company took the threat of regulatory interference — the kind that is currently being considered in court.
"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 by the next Democratic president," the document says. "This is one more factor that we should consider since even if we wanted to keep those apps together we may not be able to."
The FTC filed a lawsuit against Meta in 2020, during Donald Trump's first term. That same year, the Trump administration's antitrust authorities filed a lawsuit against Google for monopolizing the search market.
Although Zuckerberg also noted in internal correspondence that separating Instagram would unlikely have a significant impact on the company's profits, Meta later actively opposed the separation, claiming that it would harm its business.
The case is widely seen as a test of the Trump administration's resolve to combat the influence of tech giants.
During his testimony, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta acquired Instagram because it had better features than the company was trying to develop on its own, which the FTC said supports its argument that Meta acted on a "buy or destroy" basis to eliminate competitors and maintain its monopoly position.
"We were doing a build vs. buy analysis," Zuckerberg said during court testimony. "I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them."
Meta argues that Zuckerberg's past intentions are irrelevant because the FTC misdefined the boundaries of the social media market and failed to take into account competition from TikTok (ByteDance), YouTube (Alphabet), and iMessage (Apple).
Zuckerberg also admitted that Meta has repeatedly failed to create its own applications: "We probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company and the majority of them don't go anywhere."
The decision in this case could have a huge impact on the future of Meta and the digital market in general, as the separation of Instagram and WhatsApp could potentially radically change the social media industry.