By Jennifer Newstead (Vice President & General Counsel, Facebook)
Billions of people use Facebook’s products every day. To earn their time and attention, we compete fiercely against many other services across the world. As the internet has grown over the last 25 years, the ways in which people share and communicate have exploded thanks to dynamic competition. The most successful platforms mature and adapt to people’s changing preferences. Our products became and remain popular for this very reason — we constantly evolve, innovate and invest in better experiences for people against world-class competitors like Apple, Google, Twitter, Snap, Amazon, TikTok and Microsoft. We innovate and improve constantly because we have to.
We provide many ways to communicate, share and connect — with people, businesses, news and entertainment. We also help millions of businesses reach and engage with their customers. More than 200 million businesses use our free tools and services to connect with customers, hire new employees and grow their businesses. Most of our advertisers are small businesses, many of whom have benefitted by moving online to reach their customers during the pandemic.
The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general today attack two acquisitions that we made: Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. These transactions were intended to provide better products for the people who use them, and they unquestionably did. Both of these acquisitions were reviewed by relevant antitrust regulators at the time. The FTC conducted an in-depth “Second Request” of the Instagram transaction in 2012 before voting unanimously to clear it. The European Commission reviewed the WhatsApp transaction in 2014 and found no risk of harm to competition in any potential market. Regulators correctly allowed these deals to move forward because they did not threaten competition.
Now, many years later, with seemingly no regard for settled law or the consequences to innovation and investment, the agency is saying it got it wrong and wants a do-over. In addition to being revisionist history, this is simply not how the antitrust laws are supposed to work. No American antitrust enforcer has ever brought a case like this before, and for good reason. The FTC and states stood by for years while Facebook invested billions of dollars and millions of hours to make Instagram and WhatsApp into the apps that users enjoy today. And, notably, two FTC commissioners voted against the action that the FTC has taken today.
Now the agency has announced that no sale will ever be final, no matter the resulting harm to consumers or the chilling effect on innovation. When we acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, we believed these companies would be a great benefit to our Facebook users and that we could help transform them into something even better. And we did. This lawsuit risks sowing doubt and uncertainty about the US government’s own merger review process and whether acquiring businesses can actually rely on the outcomes of the legal process. It would also punish companies for protecting their investment and technology from free-riding by those who did not pay for the innovation, making those companies less likely over the long term to make their platforms available to spur the growth of new products and services.
