Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in federal court Monday as the first witness in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial seeking to break up Meta Platforms Inc.

The company’s founder and CEO will face questions about the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC is seeking to force Meta to divest those platforms, alleging the acquisitions gave Meta an illegal monopoly on portions of the social networking industry.

In initial questioning by the FTC’s lead trial lawyer, Daniel Matheson, Zuckerberg described the company’s early history and acknowledged that he rejected advice to sell the company early on because it would not be possible to compete with MySpace.

Zuckerberg went on to describe the creation of the Facebook news feed in 2006 to facilitate “real connections to actual friends.” That use is key to the FTC’s argument that the company is primarily focused on sharing information with friends and family.

Zuckerberg said the business coming from connecting friends has declined, while other parts of the company have grown more.

Allowing people to connect with friends and family “remains one of our priorities,” Zuckerberg said. However, “we’ve always been a service that lets you discover and learn about what’s going on in the world.”

Zuckerberg, 40, was expected to be on the stand for the rest of the day and much of today. He walked in with his assistant, wearing a navy suit and a powder blue tie. The courtroom was full when he started his testimony, but spectators filtered out as the questioning continued.

If the FTC prevails, a spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp would undo years of integration between the apps, disrupt two of the most popular digital consumer products in the world and potentially erase hundreds of billions of dollars in Meta’s market value. It would also raise serious questions about how the government evaluates and approves deals.

The trial is expected to last about two months and also feature testimony from former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. The company argued Monday that it faces fierce competition from several other services, especially as social media becomes more about entertainment than friends and family, and that it has provided demonstrable benefit to its users.