Day 14 of the FTC’s trial to break up Meta had some of its most explosive moments with Guy Rosen, Meta’s Chief Information Security Officer, on the stand. We start there, before circling back to Day 13. And then, a note about some of the public access issues we’re facing in court. We’ll cover Day 15 (May 7) in a future post

“An Indirect Tax on the FB App”

Guy Rosen joined Meta in 2013 when Meta acquired Onavo, a mobile analytics company founded by Rosen. Public reports showed how Meta used data from Onavo to help “clone” Snapchat’s functionality, eventually resulting in Stories. According to Meta, Rosen, as Meta’s Chief Information Security Officer, has led “an overhaul of the company’s approach to fighting abuse on the platform and built our industry-leading Integrity teams that pioneered approaches to complex challenges such as harmful content, election readiness and adversarial threats.” Basically, Rosen leads the company’s product and safety integrity efforts.

The FTC’s point in calling Guy Rosen was to show that Meta under-invested in Instagram relative to Facebook, which gets to Meta’s claimed “procompetitive” justification that acquiring Instagram helped the app grow, and that integration into Meta’s ecosystem improved safety and security efforts. The FTC wants to show that that procompetitive benefit is pretextual—and therefore doesn’t count—by highlighting all the ways in which Meta didn’t want to devote resources to Instagram. Chief Judge Boasberg said there was an “awful lot of detail” about that point, which he thought was “ancillary.” We reported first last week that testimony was getting increasingly cumulative and repetitive and that the court shared that concern.