About a year before the Federal Trade Commission first opened its antitrust investigation into Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, CEO Mark Zuckerberg internally suggested “the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company.”

Mark Zuckerberg floated the possibility of spinning off Instagram from his social media empire amid rising regulatory scrutiny of the technology sector and an increasing concern that the photo sharing app was “cannibalizing” the success of Facebook.

In a confidential 2018 email presented as evidence by the US Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, Zuckerberg told top Meta executives that as “calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next five to 10 years”.