Facebook President and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a hearing of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee examining the company’s plan to launch a digital currency on Capitol Hill in Washington, USA, on Dec. 23. October 2019.
Erin Scott | Reuters
Mark Zuckerberg defended the Facebook acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in prepared statements released Tuesday, before his testimony before the House Antimonopoly Subcommittee on Wednesday.
“Facebook has made Instagram and WhatsApp successful as part of our app family,” said Zuckerberg in his prepared comments.
Zuckerberg will be one of four technology CEOs to appear in the audience, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent.
“Instagram and WhatsApp have been able to grow and operate their services using Facebook’s lowest-cost, custom infrastructure and address spam and harmful content with Facebook’s integrity teams and technology.”
Facebook acquired Instagram for $ 1 billion in 2012. It acquired WhatsApp for $ 19 billion in 2014. In 2019. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D.-Mass., Accused Facebook of using its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp to limit competition. And she said that if she were elected president, she would appoint regulators to get rid of those “anti-competitive mergers.”
Zuckerberg argued that Instagram profited from its acquisition by using Facebook technology to stabilize its infrastructure and eliminate spam. Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, meanwhile, allowed it to make the secure messaging app free for users, he said. WhatsApp also used Facebook technology to develop video features and voice calls, Zuckerberg said.
“These benefits arose as a result of our acquisition of those companies, and would not have happened if we had not made those acquisitions,” said Zuckerberg. “We have developed new products for Instagram and WhatsApp, and we have learned from those companies to contribute new ideas to Facebook. The end result is better services that provide more value to people and advertisers, which is a central objective of the acquisition strategy From Facebook”. “
Zuckerberg also mentioned Facebook’s contributions to the open source tech community. It specifically mentions the company’s PyTorch, Detectron2, FAISS and DensePose projects.
“We offer hundreds of projects like these on Facebook Open Source and GitHub, where our projects have hundreds of thousands of followers,” he said. “I think sharing our intellectual property in this way helps the entire ecosystem move forward and develop new products.”
Zuckerberg said companies are not bad just because they are big, adding that many large companies cease to exist after not competing.
“Several years ago, Facebook moved our headquarters to the campus where Sun Microsystems used to be,” said Zuckerberg. “We kept his sign on the front, on the back of ours, to remind ourselves that things are changing rapidly in technology. I have long believed that the nature of our industry is that someday a product will replace Facebook. I want us to be the those who build it, because if we don’t, someone else will. “
.
