Facebook fined £50.5m for breaching order in Giphy takeover investigation | Hacker News Reader

Facebook fined £50.5m for breaching order in Giphy takeover investigation

theguardian.com

104 pointsljf35 comments

I suggest that these newsarticles be rewritten like this:

„Facebook fined 8 hours of revenue for breaching order in Giphy takeover investigation“

I've never understood why people focus so much on revenue. "My company has a 2M$ ARR." All right, good for you, but if you're spending 2.5M$ per year to run your company, it looks like a crappy business to me...

I would suggest something more like "Facebook fined 15 hours of profit for breaching order in Giphy takeover investigation"

On the contrary, I don’t understand why you’re focusing on profit.

It’s quite public knowledge that most companies avail accounting practices to lower profit over revenue. In fact, it’s not even a trick - investing profits back into your business is common sense.

But it's also common knowledge that there are quite a few low-margin businesses, which have insane revenue, but comparatively very low profit - general stores, for example.

Think of someone living in SF and someone living somewhere in the central US in a cheap region, both earning 100k$. If you fine both of them 10k$, the latter one probably won't have a big problem, since the living costs are rather low. Someone in SF, though, will spent most of their income on rent, so this fine will hit them hard. Calling the fine 10% of their income will totally misrepresent the impact.

> But it's also common knowledge that there are quite a few low-margin businesses, which have insane revenue, but comparatively very low profit - general stores, for example.

Sure. But Facebook isn’t one of those.

Which is pretty irrelevant - profit and revenue are only loosely correlated. My point is that simply stating the revenue percentage does hardly tell anything about the actual impact.

You have the fine them were it hurts to make it more effectual so they won't do similar things anymore.

There are also say why do they only pick on American companies but that's mostly because of SV is in the US.

It can be relevant when talking about a company like Facebook while not relevant to others.

Because in order to avoid paying taxes, a lot of companies balance books so that no profit emerges.

Yes, by paying for things and people. Because that's more valuable than paying taxes.

However, that only works if one's willing to forego paying shareholders dividends (which are paid out of net). Lots of people are not willing to do that.

Media outlets have a severe allergy to placing numbers in context, no matter who begs them to. They just want the number to look big.

> For decades I have harangued reporters about writing down really big numbers, most often budget numbers, without providing any context that would make them meaningful for their audience. Even though leading news outlets, like the New York Times (NYT), Washington Post (WaPo), and National Public Radio (NPR), have well-educated audiences, most readers/listeners have no idea what $250 billion, or some other huge sum, over the next decade means. (Often the time period over which money will be spent is not even specified in a piece – it does matter.)

https://cepr.net/the-new-york-times-big-deficit-numbers/

The Times Is Working on Ways to Make Numbers-Based Stories Clearer for Readers By Margaret Sullivan - October 18, 2013 2:46 pm

https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/the-times-...

Remembers me this extension: https://dictionaryofnumbers.com/ (for Chrome, don't know about other browsers).

Not sure it would have give the correct context (i.e., Facebook value) but would give swome context.

> They just want the number to look big.

yes but on the other hand if they combined it with the hours of revenue you would have a big number that looks impressive being dwarfed by the realization of how big and scary that means Facebook is.

Media outlets have a severe allergy to placing numbers in context, no matter who begs them to.

Maybe they're lazy?

And no matter how "well-educated" their audiences are, a very large fraction of them and their audiences are innumerate, it's hard to get across the message you desire.

> Facebook fined 8 hours of revenue for breaching order in Giphy takeover investigation

This juxtaposes a local fine on a subsidiary to a conglomerate's global revenue. That's fine. It's revealing, in some ways. But it's more clickbait than the actual fine.

This is Facebook acting as though they are above the law.

The next time they attempt a takeover this should be rolled out as evidence of their likely behaviour and should be grounds for blocking that takeover.

If you won't play by the rules then you don't get to play at all.

Edit: Someone should ask Nick Clegg, a former UK lawmaker, why it's ok to break the law in that country.

Almost certainly - it's worthing bearing in mind the CMA fined them 155x the previous record for this kind of penalty.

The investigation also appears to be ongoing; I would expect the final decision to also be substantial.

How about: “acting because they are above the law”?

“This should serve as a warning to any company that thinks it is above the law,” said Joel Bamford, a director of mergers at the CMA.

Like some people have said - 8 hours of revenue. I think it confirms that breaking the law in the UK is excellent value for money!

They should lose their trademarks and domain names after three offenses.

I really wish this article had more detail. Maybe there are legal filings somewhere with them, but this leaves a lot to the imagination as to what the non-compliance was:

> The regulator said Facebook significantly limited the scope of the updates it was meant to provide proving it was complying with the order despite repeated warnings.

Acquisition was 290m pounds so 50.5m isn't that high. Probably should be in the 30% at least.

If you break your word about an acquisition, make it the cost of the purchase + 100% of any value that acquisition generated (a good rule of thumb would be ~10x the amount of money spent on supporting that BU or the total amount of revenue, whichever is higher).

Seems like everyone is concerned about moral hazards for normal crimes yet white collar crimes like this are extremely underpunished to the point that you can factor that fine into your P&L.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

That price was for a global deal, not just the UK. 50.5M is likely higher than Giphy's UK revenues for a year. It does seem punitive.

TFA also says that Austria fined FB ~10M for the same deal.

It might all have been priced into the deal as some other comments have pointed out. If the goal is to truly deter, then the CMA should perhaps make FB unwind the deal at least in the UK.

Isn't the point here that they've already integrated the business - otherwise why not just comply with the disclosure requirement?

Also not sure that we can measure the value to Facebook in this way. This is about strengthening Facebook's core business which is worth (just guessing) > $500bn. How much value it adds is unknown but I bet it's a lot more than the acquisition price.

TFA states that FB believes any disclosure and separation was on a best effort basis, and they've complied.

As to the impact on the core business, you're right. However, FB is not worth $500B in the UK alone where this dispute is.

> Facebook said it had made its “best effort” to comply with the IEO.

That's not the same as what you've said here.

priced in

"Pay them. In the scheme of things, it's a[nother] speeding ticket."

Facebook: Places £50m bill on the nightstand. “Buy yerself sumthin’ nice.”

£50.5m is nothing when compared to Facebook's gross earnings.

It should be at least £500m.

How many hours of ad revenue does this translate to?

> In 2020, Facebook's advertising revenue worldwide amounted to 84.2 billion U.S. dollars

= Roughly 61,196,981,000 GBP

= Roughly 167,600,000 GBP per day

So, roughly 8 hours?

Just another day in the life...

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