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Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

theguardian.com

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Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#31

Post by petercooper »

gambiting wrote: post #21
petercooper wrote: post #3

Regardless of the merits of the case, it's interesting to see that a UK watchdog is able to exert such power over a US corporation. There's more background here: https://taxjustice.net/2022/01/18/the-uk-is-breaking-up-face... – they seem to be giving Brexit the credit for UK regulators able to make independent decisions from the EU's own competition regulators

Which is of course complete nonsense and UK has had a competition regulator that was effective and able to operate independently of EU even before Brexit. Every EU country can set the rules what companies can operate in every member state and how, and obviously UK was always able to do this. (For a simple example - look at France constantly fining and regulating US tech giants without having to ask Brussels for permi…

Fair enough. I was just going off of what Nick Shaxson, who seems to be quite smart on such matters, said in that post. I'm a remainer myself, so to find any sort of "benefit" in Brexit is very rare indeed.. ;-)

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#32

Post by shubhamjain »

At first I thought Giphy might have been a UK company, but no. It's an American company founded in New York. Ignoring the merits of the judgement—ridiculous as they are—does no one sense terrible outreach in issuing a ruling on a merger about two companies which are in no way related to the country issuing it?

This has terrible repercussions for the American tech economy. Every big tech company would think twice before acquiring another company. What if years from now, EU rules that Adobe's acquisition of Figma was illegal and it should unwind it? Perhaps, this is one reason why Microsoft is choosing to home-grow clones of Notion[1] and Canva[2], instead of acquiring them. Maybe that's the path big tech would be forced to take from now on.

[1]: https://medium.com/geekculture/microsoft-loop-clones-notion-...

[2]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-announces-canva-comp...

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#34

Post by vanderZwan »

gambiting wrote: post #21
petercooper wrote: post #3

Regardless of the merits of the case, it's interesting to see that a UK watchdog is able to exert such power over a US corporation. There's more background here: https://taxjustice.net/2022/01/18/the-uk-is-breaking-up-face... – they seem to be giving Brexit the credit for UK regulators able to make independent decisions from the EU's own competition regulators

Which is of course complete nonsense and UK has had a competition regulator that was effective and able to operate independently of EU even before Brexit. Every EU country can set the rules what companies can operate in every member state and how, and obviously UK was always able to do this. (For a simple example - look at France constantly fining and regulating US tech giants without having to ask Brussels for permi…

Willfully representing how the EU works is a longstanding tradition of UK media. The EU even has a dedicated page for debunking British tabloid media lies.

edit: sadly I can't find it now, newer post-truth issues like Covid-19 seem to drown it out in my search engines

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#35

Post by rrdharan »

What’s funny is they’ll end up selling it to some IAC-type conglomerate with a huge data brokering business, and far poorer security and privacy practices, but which will escape the eye of lazy regulators who will keep looking to target splashy American brand names to score political points.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#36

Post by causi »

tehwebguy wrote: post #18

This is the funniest thing ever to me. Everyone who thinks about this for more than a moment realizes Giphy has never had any value at all. They might as well be licensing different types of burps.

Giphy's primary functionality is pissing off people trying to use Google Image Search to find an actual .gif file only to find nothing but silent videos pretending to be gifs.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#37

Post by tootie »

shubhamjain wrote: post #32

At first I thought Giphy might have been a UK company, but no. It's an American company founded in New York. Ignoring the merits of the judgement—ridiculous as they are—does no one sense terrible outreach in issuing a ruling on a merger about two companies which are in no way related to the country issuing it? This has terrible repercussions for the American tech economy. Every big tech company would think twice befo…

I wonder if Meta just isn't interested in fighting any more because Giphy isn't that valuable to them. Gif mania has ebbed. The court ruling is giving them a pretense to cut their losses and save face.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#38

Post by christophilus »

shubhamjain wrote: post #32

At first I thought Giphy might have been a UK company, but no. It's an American company founded in New York. Ignoring the merits of the judgement—ridiculous as they are—does no one sense terrible outreach in issuing a ruling on a merger about two companies which are in no way related to the country issuing it? This has terrible repercussions for the American tech economy. Every big tech company would think twice befo…

> Every big tech company would think twice before acquiring another company.

I agree with your sentiment, but this seems like a good outcome.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#39

Post by beckingz »

shubhamjain wrote: post #32

At first I thought Giphy might have been a UK company, but no. It's an American company founded in New York. Ignoring the merits of the judgement—ridiculous as they are—does no one sense terrible outreach in issuing a ruling on a merger about two companies which are in no way related to the country issuing it? This has terrible repercussions for the American tech economy. Every big tech company would think twice befo…

So the repercussions are more competition and less large companies buying smaller companies and running them into the ground?

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#40

Post by jeffwask »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #24
tehwebguy wrote: post #18

This is the funniest thing ever to me. Everyone who thinks about this for more than a moment realizes Giphy has never had any value at all. They might as well be licensing different types of burps.

If you think about it for more than 2 moments you will see that owning Giphy allows Facebook to see which chat apps you're using (via the api key for the app's Giphy integration) and who you're talking to on them (by attaching an id to each gif similar to how tracking pixels work in email.) Most chat clients automatically load images, triggering the tracker. This gives Facebook unprecedented visibility into the user…

But it's just gifs, lol roflface. The shortsightedness of everyone on this thread who are all just too happy to hand everything to monopolies.
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