At Meta's landmark trial, a stroll through a graveyard of dead apps

Washington: The most telling moment of the US antitrust trial against Meta so far came halfway through more than 10 hours of testimony from Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive.

On the witness stand last week, Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook and later renamed his company Meta, was asked by government lawyers to watch a seven-minute video of an interview he gave at a tech conference more than a decade ago. With his brow furrowed and eyes scrunched, the 40-year-old tech billionaire watched his 28-year-old self describe how the world of 2012 had "really underestimated" his company.

Back then, smartphones were a burgeoning computing platform rather than the dominant one. Facebook was still primarily used on desktop computers, and Zuckerberg's social network was at risk of losing users to a flurry of startups.

The older Zuckerberg occasionally winced as he watched his younger self on video discuss some of his early competitive concerns, such as the potential for Dropbox, a file-sharing company, to become a rival in photo sharing. In hindsight, he said on the stand, it was "pretty ridiculous" to think that Dropbox would compete with Facebook.

It was, in short, a reminder of a very different era -- an age of social apps, Silicon Valley hubris and Ivy League-educated entrepreneurs, which Meta's antitrust trial has plunged people back into, in a courtroom in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. At issue in the landmark case is what could have happened if Zuckerberg had never made two key deals, buying Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and whether he quashed competition with the acquisitions.

Sitting in Judge James E. Boasberg's courtroom for the first two weeks of testimony has been like entering a time warp. Executives who have long since left Meta -- including Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg's former second-in-command, and Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram -- are main witnesses. Lawyers have dredged up emails that date back more than a decade.

To show that Meta was paranoid about competition, prosecutors have also strolled through a graveyard of dead apps that worried Zuckerberg and his lieutenants at the time.

At one point, lawyers spent hours discussing Path, a personal social network that went kaput in 2018. Other apps that have come up at the trial include Orkut, a social network that was popular in South America (now dead); Evernote, a note-taking app (changed leaders, then was sold off); and Google Plus, Google's rejoinder to Facebook (very, very dead).

The testimony has underscored the government's steep challenge in bringing a case, Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, against a fast-moving modern tech giant. By the time the 5-year-old lawsuit reached trial last week, Silicon Valley had moved on from battling over social networking to battling over artificial intelligence, quantum computing and driverless cars -- so much so that it was sometimes hard to relate to what was discussed in court.

Social media has evolved, too. At the trial, government lawyers have tried to define Meta's social networking market as one that is about connecting with friends and family. That's because more than a decade ago, Facebook had a distinct advantage with its "friend graph," which is the group of friends, family and personal connections a user is linked with on the social network. That graph made it more difficult for users to pack up and easily go elsewhere.

But a decade is a long time in internet years, and somewhere along the way, social media became less about social and more about media. People now post fewer status updates and photos. Scrolling through apps is less about sharing with friends and more about letting strangers entertain you.

That evolution was abundantly clear in the Washington courtroom as members of the gallery occasionally chuckled at just how different things used to be. A lawyer who showed up daily to observe the trial laughed aloud when, at one point, Sandberg testified and politely pushed back on a reference to Cambridge Analytica, a British voter-profiling firm that tapped Facebook data without users' consent before the 2016 presidential election. Sandberg, who said the Cambridge Analytica issues were "alleged" rather than settled fact, appeared briefly distracted by the outburst.

The trial has been such a throwback that an inordinate amount of time was also spent explaining why Instagram photo filters were, at the time, seen as the second coming of product innovation.

Some witnesses also had to explain to Boasberg that Dave Morin, the founder of Path; Drew Houston, a founder of Dropbox; and Ben Silbermann, a founder of Pinterest, were hotshot executives homing in on social media in the early 2010s.

At another point, Zuckerberg reminded the courtroom that in 2018, watching video on a smartphone was just beginning to take off. Meta had ignored the trend at its own peril, he said, with TikTok and YouTube becoming powerhouses. TikTok could have cost Meta $3 billion to $6 billion in revenue over a few years if it did not act, according to the company's internal modeling at the time.

"We were really feeling the impact," Zuckerberg said.

Lawyers also asked questions about a 7-year-old beef between Zuckerberg and Systrom, as well as one between Zuckerberg and Jan Koum, a founder of WhatsApp. Zuckerberg praised Systrom, but testified that working with him had its "quirks."

Zuckerberg went on to note how difficult it was for him to manage Koum and Brian Acton, another founder of WhatsApp, because of their resistance to feedback on product development.

"It's hard to really express the disdain they had for other social features in other social apps," Zuckerberg said. The courtroom stirred.

In testimony on Tuesday, Systrom did not praise Zuckerberg. Instead, he said Meta had starved Instagram of resources, and he characterized Zuckerberg's actions as stemming partly from what seemed like jealousy.

"He felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, meaning Instagram or Facebook," Systrom said. "And I think there were real human emotional things going on there."

As executives described the changes in social media at trial, many of their recollections seemed almost quaint in retrospect -- that is, if they could recall their thought process at all. Many witnesses said they could not remember their thinking from more than a decade ago.

On Monday, Neeraj Arora, a venture capital investor who worked at Google more than 15 years ago, was asked about a 2010 memo he had written to Google executives to pitch them on buying WhatsApp to "supercharge our mobile social initiatives."

It was "so many years back, it's hard for me to remember," Arora said.

Even Systrom paused at the trip down memory lane. When asked on Tuesday if the problem of spam had contributed to the decline of Myspace, an early social network, he stopped to refresh his memory.

"I haven't thought about that company in a long time," he said.