Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled on Wednesday by lawmakers in US about the company's purchase of photo and video sharing social networking service, Instagram.
In an email sent in February 2012, Mark tells David Ebersman, the company's chief financial officer then, that he was thinking about how much money they should spend on buying apps like Instagram and Path that competed with Facebook.
"The businesses are nascent but the networks are established, the brands are already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us," he wrote in the email as released by House Judiciary Committee.
In another email, he agreed with an employee's assessment that Instagram and not Google Plus was a threat to Facebook.
"You were basically right," he wrote in an email. "One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them. I think this is a good outcome for everyone."
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said that the documents "tell a very disturbing story" in which Facebook bought Instagram instead of competing with it.
"This is exactly the type of anti-competitive acquisition that the antitrust laws were designed to prevent," Nadler told Zuckerberg.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal told that the company put the same pressure on Snapchat CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel. In another email that she cited, Mark said that Facebook "can likely just buy any competitive startups, but it'll be a while before we can buy Google.”
When asked about his past remarks, Mark Zuckerberg told that he didn't recall writing these but "it sounds like a joke."
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