In a striking revelation from the ongoing antitrust trial against Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg once considered spinning off Instagram in 2018—a move that underscores the tech giant’s early awareness of growing regulatory risks. The internal memo, presented in court on Tuesday, showed Zuckerberg weighing the strategic costs of tighter integration among Meta’s platforms against the possibility of future government intervention.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently seeking to unwind Meta’s high-profile acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, alleging the company has maintained a monopoly in the social media space by buying out potential competitors. Zuckerberg’s internal deliberations are now being used as key evidence in the case.
> “I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company,” Zuckerberg wrote in the 2018 memo, expressing concern over the optics and potential consequences of consolidating Meta’s family of apps.
At the time, Meta was developing plans to more closely integrate Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—a move that many analysts now view as a preemptive defense against potential breakups. In the memo, Zuckerberg noted that while integration could yield “strong business growth,” it might also “erode” the value of Facebook’s core social network and provoke regulatory backlash.
### “Buy or Bury” Strategy Under Scrutiny
Zuckerberg’s courtroom testimony reinforced the FTC’s claim that Meta employed a “buy or bury” approach to competition. When questioned about Instagram’s acquisition, he admitted that Instagram’s superior photo capabilities played a major role in the decision to acquire the company rather than compete with it.
> “We were doing a build versus buy analysis,” Zuckerberg said. “Instagram had a better camera than we were building, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
This echoes an infamous 2008 email—previously disclosed by the FTC—in which Zuckerberg said, “It is better to buy than compete.”
### Changing Tone on Breakups
Interestingly, the 2018 memo also included an acknowledgement from Zuckerberg that corporate breakups are not always detrimental. He noted that historically, companies often perform better post-breakup due to fewer “strategy taxes” and overestimated synergies.
> “While most companies resist breakups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up,” he wrote—contradicting Meta’s more recent public stance that separating its apps would harm the business and innovation.
### FTC Challenges Meta’s Market Definition
The FTC argues that Meta has used its dominance in platforms for sharing content with friends and family to stifle competition—particularly from upstarts like Snap’s Snapchat and the privacy-focused app MeWe. According to the agency, platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit serve different user intents and aren’t direct substitutes.
Meta, on the other hand, has pushed back on this characterization, arguing that it faces intense competition from various platforms and that the FTC is defining the market too narrowly.
### Trial’s Significance for Big Tech
This high-profile case is being closely watched as a bellwether for how aggressively the Trump administration plans to pursue Big Tech regulation. Although the FTC filed its lawsuit during Trump’s first term, current leadership continues to press forward with attempts to rein in Meta’s dominance.
Zuckerberg’s testimony also shed light on Meta’s internal challenges, with the CEO admitting that many of its attempts to develop new apps internally had failed.
> “We probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company, and the majority of them don’t go anywhere,” he said.
The trial is expected to have lasting implications not just for Meta, but for the broader tech industry, as regulators grapple with how to apply antitrust laws in the digital age.
