Would transcoding GIFs to VP9 and repackaging them into WEBMs be enough to eschew sanctions ?
No, Giphy, GifyCat, Tenor and pretty much every other gif distribution service has already done something like this from the get go. The GIF is just not well suited for large scale distribution when html supports elements that support non-garbage file formats. I would assume the current ruling is meant to cover 'gifs' as a broad term for looping short form video.
GIF ain't garbage. It's still king for certain types of images, a format from the 80's.
Meta also has offices and thousands of employees in the UK. Presumably the UK government could ban them from operating in the UK completely which would be a pretty big hit to those employees and all the teams that are based there.
The question is if the UK wants to really destroy thousands of jobs over a gif service acquisition, especially in this economy. I would hope they wouldn't do that to their own people. You're not really hurting FB, you're hurting your own citizens. Is that really the best use of regulation, political power, etc? Can FB buy Tenor then? Is any gif service off limits? Who can buy Giphy? Any other social media?
Someone's clearly not familiar with the UK government's approach to jobs and the economy
> The regulator said Meta would be able to increase its “already significant market power” by cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals, or demand more user data from them in order to keep using Giphy. I’m imagining a future in which Meta cuts off the winter supply of GIFs to the European Union, setting the populace into a restive period of incoherent communication. Perhaps the EU, UK, and US should establish strategi…
The phrase "cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals" may be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. I honestly can't believe someone wrote that in a legal opinion. To me this smacks of our leaders, broadly, in the West being too old and too far removed from how people operate and live in the world today. This is like Lindsey Graham, who was once on the senate technology committee, admitting that he had…
I am under the impression that this is kind of true, though, in that you might think of Giphy as a massive pile of user content under dubious or illegitimate licensing, but it actually (ridiculously) is a repository of exclusively-licensed content that is contributed by such groups as motion picture companies (and which is then also what kind of led to the downfall of the concept, as the existence of Giphy and its narrow catalog of official gifs OK'd by marketing and legal departments started to feel stale).
> poorer security. likely so, Meta does have thousands of competent engineers, ensuring their data remains exactly where they want it to be
> Meta does have thousands of competent engineers, ensuring their data remains exactly where they want it to be do they, aye? https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security/meta-probe-533-...
Practically every website is vulnerable to an attacker scraping it. If you give people information it's hard to stop them from saving that information.
The phrase "cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals" may be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. I honestly can't believe someone wrote that in a legal opinion. To me this smacks of our leaders, broadly, in the West being too old and too far removed from how people operate and live in the world today. This is like Lindsey Graham, who was once on the senate technology committee, admitting that he had…
This kind of barely surface level understanding by clueless bureaucrats (remember "a series of tubes"?) is generally what you sign up for when you ask for regulation in technology. It is the reason I am usually skeptical of such calls for legislation, because the end result could be worse than what we started with.
I'm inclined to agree. This reminds me of the anti-piracy legislation.
It's funny that digital billboard space is the main reason they cite. To me the much bigger threat was that Giphy had integrations into many other chat and messaging apps which Facebook also competes with. Buying Giphy gave them new insight into competitor usage. Facebook could see which chat apps you were using and who you were talking to on them. All they had to do was fingerprint the gifs you sent to your friends
you know they can already buy that data from ad networks, right?
> The phrase "cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals" may be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. I honestly can't believe someone wrote that in a legal opinion. I would very much doubt that was the actual wording, that's most likely a paraphrasing by the author of this article. The final report is not released yet, but according to the summary pdf linked from https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/facebook-i…
> On this basis, we consider that Facebook would also have an incentive to foreclose its rivals from access to GIPHY. That seems like a slightly more intelligent wording of the same bad argument to me. There’s no real limit on the supply of gifs on the internet, and they aren’t really in particularly high demand. In fact they’re already falling out of fashion with younger users. You’ll be hard pressed to find many pe…
> You’ll be hard pressed to find many people under 25 using them at all.
> The EU has previously ordered Microsoft to sell Windows without Windows Media Player in EU markets. Yet Facebook still saw fit to open an office there. There's a difference between a build tweak for another market, and a non-US country reaching into the US and blocking an acquisition of one US company by another.
then they are free not to operate in the UK. You seem surprised that UK law holds in the UK.
> The regulator said Meta would be able to increase its “already significant market power” by cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals, or demand more user data from them in order to keep using Giphy. I’m imagining a future in which Meta cuts off the winter supply of GIFs to the European Union, setting the populace into a restive period of incoherent communication. Perhaps the EU, UK, and US should establish strategi…