Although people around the world use our products, Facebook is a proudly American company. We
believe in values -- democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression -- that the American economy
was built on. Many other tech companies share these values, but there’s no guarantee our values will win
out. For example, China is building its own version of the internet focused on very different ideas, and
they are exporting their vision to other countries. As Congress and other stakeholders consider how
antitrust laws support competition in the U.S., I believe it’s important to maintain the core values of
openness and fairness that have made America’s digital economy a force for empowerment and
opportunity here and around the world.
III. Facebook’s History of Innovation
In a competitive economy, innovation leads to improvements that benefit consumers. I understand this is
one of the key goals of antitrust law, and it is what Facebook has been focused on since day one. We’ve
consistently added new products for people that enhance their ability to connect and share what matters
most to them.
Our service began as a text-based website. Today on Facebook you can share almost any type of digital
content; read news; broadcast or watch live video; play games; connect with businesses; buy or sell
products; send and receive payments; organize groups and events; and raise money for important causes.
WhatsApp provides secure and reliable communication, including voice and video calls. Instagram offers
photo sharing with tools to connect and create. And the Facebook family goes beyond software, with
hardware products like Oculus and Portal.
We built these new products and services because the intense competitive pressures we face push us to
experiment with new ideas. We are always working to develop technologies that will change how people
connect and communicate in the future, and we invest around $10 billion per year in research and
development. We know that if we don’t constantly keep improving, we will fall behind.
Many of our products were new concepts when we introduced them, and they have served as models for
other companies and apps that have used and iterated on our ideas -- including features like News Feed
ranking and the Like button that have become foundational to many competitive services. We have also
helped advance nascent technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual
reality (VR).
We actively contribute to the open-source community. For example, we developed the PyTorch open-
source project, which has become one of the most successful AI development tools and is now used
worldwide to create new AI technology and applications. We also released Detectron2, our computer
vision technology which we use for integrity work; FAISS, a state-of-the-art search tool for finding
similar multimedia documents; and DensePose, for 3D interpretation of 2D images. We offer hundreds of
projects like these on Facebook Open Source and GitHub, where our projects have hundreds of thousands
of followers. We also share the results of our hardware research: for example, we developed the world’s
most efficient servers and published the plans so everyone could use them as part of our Open Compute
Project. I believe sharing our intellectual property this way helps the entire ecosystem move forward and
develop new products.
We create technology to enable social good. For example, our Crisis Response tools allow people to let
family and friends know they are safe, share information during a crisis, and help communities recover.
Our Safety Check tool has been activated in more than 1,400 crises. In 2018 alone, our community used
Crisis Response tools for over 300 crises in more than 80 countries. We’ve also developed charitable
giving tools that make it easy for our community to raise money for causes they care about on Facebook.