Meta ordered to sell Giphy by UK's competition watchdog CMA | Hacker News Reader

Meta ordered to sell Giphy by UK's competition watchdog CMA

bbc.com

55 pointspseudolus23 comments

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33246016

It's amazing how something as harmless as a .GIF gets weaponized by big tech and abused for things like 'sentiment analysis' and profiling of users. This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm really confused as to why the CMA had a say in this matter at all. Meta and Giphy are/were both US companies. OK, they do business in the UK, but they do business in a lot of other places too.

If the competition regulator for the Federated States of Micronesia had an issue with this acquisition and wanted to block it, would Meta abide by their ruling? If not, how big does a country have to be before their competition regulator is allowed to interfere in mergers between foreign-owned companies?

Also, if the US has a problem with a merger between two UK companies, do we in the UK have to abide by their ruling? What about if it is France rather than the US? What if it's Russia?

If you want to do business in a market, you have to follow the market's rules.

So it's essentially a set of parallel games of chicken between played out between the companies and regulators ("do what we say or we fine you" / "let us do what we want or we leave")?

I guess that's workable, but it seems an unusual solution in a rules-based world.

If you don't abide, you get penalties, from fines to being banned from the market. It's up to each company whether they accept that risk or not.

>Also, if the US has a problem with a merger between two UK companies, do we in the UK have to abide by their ruling?

If the UK business wants to do business in the US... yes.

>What about if it is France rather than the US?

Yes.

>What if it's Russia?

Yes.

Companies must comply with local laws if they wish to conduct business in those countries.

For example, countries may dictate requirements on the telecommunications products sold in their own countries. This is the one of the reasons my UK-sold iPhone has an FCC certification (and even Russian and Belarusian certifications) and iPhones in the US might have CE or UKCA certifications.

This applies to less portable products, too: my Philips Hue bulbs have CE markings even though I'm not in the EU.

What a strange acquisition for the UK competition authorities to make a stand over.

There must be a thousand more anti-competitive mergers than this one every year.

> The ruling is the first time the UK has blocked an acquisition by a tech giant, signalling a new determination to scrutinise digital deals.

Gotta start somewhere, I guess.

Well it certainly makes one wonder what else could have been the "Somewhere" from which the UK "gotta start"?a Off the top of my head...

* Elon Musk + Twitter 2022

* Microsoft + Activision 2022

* Salesforce + Slack 2022

* GitHub + Microsoft 2019

* Red Hat + IBM 2018

The Giphy deal, at like ~$400m, is so small it hardly even registers on my radar. It's not a small deal, nor a large deal. It's like the UK saw that it would be irritating to Meta, but not too irritating for them to exit the UK over.

Or how about Meta and the dozen VR studios it acquired.

It's likely that a future AR/VR world will be another duopoly only this time with Apple and Meta.

Why is elon musk buying twitter anticompetitive? he doesn't own anything that'd break competition.

No other social network on a SpaceX rocket!

"They expect one of us in the wreckage brother"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn3Ztd-ErTw

I had no idea Twitter was buying Elon Musk, or is it GitHub buying Microsoft?

Sorry, couldn't help but make a stupid joke about the inconsistency in that list.

They are solid. They blocked Amazon investment into deliveroo for a while after some investigation. CMA are on job

Would have been great if the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were also blocked, they were both anticompetitive and quickly degenerated in quality post-acquisition

That's weird considering gif creation/hosting meme sites are a dime a dozen and they all go through a realtively short lifecycle of small scale good quality, rapid growth with costs increasing, quality decreasing as adware obfuscates content, and either implosion or buy-out by the mega-site who's users use it.

The “problem” is that Giphy is widely integrated into other software/web applications (like Microsoft Teams). That’s also what makes it so valuable.

Teams/Slack don't show ads. With all the meme generator/hosting options I can't figure out what the anti-trust argument is here. Seems like people are so mad at Meta they couldn't acquire a dog walking business.

Wish u.s would have some guts and start clamping down on this behaviour too. There’s no reason for Facebook to own Instagram, WhatsApp and oculus. Absolutely none. It’s a farce that one company holds so much data

Agree that those are the acquisitions that needed interference. I don't understand how there's an Animated GIF Trust, though.

Does this impact the ability to select GIFs to embed in Facebook posts and comments, or are they sourced from elsewhere?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com