7 ms·

Facebook shouldn't be allowed to buy Giphy, says UK regulator

130 points by elorant 5y ago

0235005 5y ago
This hopefully seem like the beginning of the end for the Facebook monopoly and excessive acquisitons.
- varelse 5y ago
  In one corner, we have technologically behind the curve government bureaucrats and mediocre lawyers, in the other, we have bottomless pockets and the best lawyers money can buy... Fight!!!
  - echelon 5y ago
    We seem to have forgotten victories like GDPR, CCPA, and the Microsoft anti-trust case. The Microsoft anti-trust case took the wind out of Microsoft's sails and kept the web free just long enough for new giants to emerge. (And Microsoft remains a 1T+ company. If anything, it made them stronger because they had to diversify and fight harder.) If we (or Europe) try it again, we might see more wealth in more companies. More experiments. More innovation. Less moat defending, taxation, walled gardens, and comprehensive surveillance dragnets. Having Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon own everything makes them all complacent iterators, data hoarders, tax collectors, and small business/innovation cripplers. The anti-trust hammer is a powerful tool. It elevated our entire industry. We (through our elected officials) should wield it.
    - varelse 5y ago
      Yeah good luck with that Outlook. I think Steve Ballmer is the one who knocked the wind out of the sails and the sales of Microsoft more than the antitrust lawsuit but maybe I'm just crazy. My own experience with Microsoft during the naughts was shortly after having unified Windows NT and consumer Windows through Windows XP, they scrapped it for a glorified CPU/GPU hardware land grab called Vista. And everything sucked again for another 5 years 100% unnecessarily. As for GDPR and CCPA. Yeah, thanks a whole hell of a lot. The tech companies are just as creepy as they ever were, but now I have to fill out a form to acknowledge how creepy they are. So privacy, very security. Go split Amazon into Amazon retail and Amazon Web Services. Go split Microsoft into Microsoft OS, Microsoft gaming, Microsoft office, and Microsoft Cloud Computing. Go smash Google into 10 or more independent companies. Pull any one of those things off and I'll be impressed. Otherwise it's all sound and fury to me but I guess it keeps the bureaucrats gainfully employed and off the streets so there's that. The funny part is that the whole Microsoft antitrust thing was about Internet Explorer, which was always a crap-tastic web browser, and it has now more or less died off of natural causes because Google outcroptasticed them and Mozilla, despite abundant internal funding, squandered it all.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  What exactly does Facebook have a monopoly on?
  - croes 5y ago
    Social network in large parts of the world.
  - mishafb 5y ago
    Messaging, in my country. SMS isn't a thing here, WhatsApp is used by literally everyone.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Is it a monopoly in the sense that everyone is forced to use it and Facebook is able to charge high fees, or do people have multiple options on the app store (signal, telegram, etc) and they just choose Whatsapp
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
>The CMA provisionally found that Facebook’s ownership of Giphy could lead it to deny other platforms access to its GIFs It's GIFs? Since when did Giphy own anything that it distributes. The idea that gifs are centralized is absurd.
- rvz 5y ago
  Yeah. It sounds like a terrible argument. I'm sure the same Gifs are available on Imgur and gfycat.com as well.
- stirfish 5y ago
  >Since when did Giphy own anything that it distributes. Copyright law confuses me too.
pg_bot 5y ago
This seems like retaliation for the success of their previous acquisitions of instagram and whatsapp. GIFs are not a money maker, and almost anyone could build a competitor to giphy without hassle. There's no secret sauce, none of their content is protectable, and there's no moat that can protect whatever advantage they have. Plus it sounds like their business was already under duress, so why block an acquisition for any other reason than spite or incompetence?
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Facebook already has way too much power over the data of way too many citizens, and they continue to buy up data lakes left and right. This is what is upsetting European regulators and anti-trust agencies. The article quotes the CMA: > Alternatively, it could change the terms of this access – for example, Facebook could require Giphy customers, such as TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat, to provide more user data in order to access Giphy GIFs. Such actions could increase Facebook’s market power, which is already significant. And then, as if to show that the author hasn't understood a tiny bit of the issue at hand, he writes: > Putting aside the logic that someone would switch to using Facebook because of GIFs (I love GIFs as much as the next person, but come on), the CMA argues that Giphy was in the process of building up an ads business that would have competed with Facebook. It's not "building an ads business", the issue the CMA has is that everyone and their dog, including people not on Facebook, uses Giphy - which means that if Facebook were to buy Giphy they could scoop up an awful lot of data.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Spite and/or sending a message/being seen to send a message to Facebook seem like likely factors.
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  I always thought it was because Giphy is integrated into a bunch of mobile keyboards and third party chat services. These services would never integrate a Facebook gif service because of the implication. So giphy's entire valuation lies in being a trojan horse for an established surveillance capitalist.
lloydatkinson 5y ago
Good. Many services use giphy and I don’t want to need a Facebook account to use gifs.
- berkes 5y ago
  Even if you can keep using it without such an account, it is another datasource for Facebook. Another way to track you in your daily use of tech.
- evad3r 5y ago
  I wouldn't see them enforcing needing a Facebook account, in the same way that you don't need a Facebook account to use Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp. That's almost worse in a way.
- isoskeles 5y ago
  I believe they’re just going to log your IP and sell that data to other companies. If someone posts a gif from Giphy in my Slack workspace, FB could sell my IP and Slack metadata to anyone else, and then I probably start seeing ads (if I’m not using uBlock for some reason) for B2B stuff related to my job. Maybe if a gif gets posted to “#engineering” they show me Software Engineer job ads.
the-dude 5y ago
"Facebook is allowed to buy Whatsapp if it does not merge the identities / keeps WA separate from FB" ( EU ). Well, what the heck. I thought they really said that. But this : https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_1088 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_... does not say so.
leros 5y ago
What happens if only the UK says this but the US allows it?
- detaro 5y ago
  What the US thinks is not really relevant to what UK regulators do. Facebook still has to deal with their actions one way or the other.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrkramer 5y ago
Ok I'll try to be serious how exactly monopoly over GIFs would endanger users of social networks and industry in general? Except Facebook gathering your GIFs usage data. Facebook would know what GIFs you use that's a big problem isn't it?! Why did they allow acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp then? Makes zero sense to me. And if Facebook is not allowed to buy other social networks then Chinese will buy them. And then again we will be in the same situation just like we are with TikTok and Huawei. Data going to CCP and not to Corporate America. I prefer Corporate America over CCP to be honest.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  IP address and gif search term might be a valuable data point to add about a person.
  - ljm 5y ago
    With the Slack integration, someone using `/giphy searchterm` will send over things like: slack enterprise ID, team ID, user ID, the team's domain, their name, the slack workspace's name, etc... Facebook could quite easily use that data to draw more connections between people. Who they work with, who they might know within the same teams and enterprises, etc. etc.
    - ec109685 5y ago
      No, that's incorrect. The giphy command is created by Slack and doesn't share any data with Giphy [1]. [1] https://medium.com/delta-cx/facebook-bought-giphy-but-doesnt-really-care-how-you-use-gifs-26e99514e5e7 https://medium.com/delta-cx/facebook-bought-giphy-but-doesnt...
      - crtasm 5y ago
        That says "...designed to give Giphy nearly zero data.", unclear what is still shared. Signal goes to great lengths to preserve privacy with their giphy integration: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
Traster 5y ago
I think this is actually a great decision by the UK regulator. I'm not convinced it'll be effective, but I think it's the right move. You can't have the largest encumbent in a space start to hoover up its suppliers to the detriment of its competitors.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Based, beware of communist gangs.
menmob 5y ago
My only real experience with giphy was when I was assisting ArchiveTeam in saving some gifs thaf giphy was going to delete. They wouldn’t give us a list of gifs that would be deleted, despite saying they wanted to help us. So we hit their API to get what GIFs were needed after they gave us a go-ahead (I don’t entirely remember how much permission was given here- it’s been a while.). After maybe an hour of hitting them fast enough to get the information we needed to save the gifs before they were deleted (which really wasn’t that many IIRC. Maybe 50/sec?), the whole site went down. Later that evening, the CEO then threatened ArchiveTeam and got some bad press for suing some volunteers just trying to save some funny cat videos. It didn’t ever amount to much, and I think they reversed the decision to remove them anyway. Totally unrelated to the topic, but whenever someone mentions Giphy, this is all I can think about..
Tempest1981 5y ago
Recently discussed here: (4 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156656 (91 comments)
suifbwish 5y ago
A bit off topic but on a similar note is there anything protecting intellectual property monopolies? This may sound ridiculous but culture has a big impact on its host society. For hypothetical instance: Is there anything preventing big media corporations from buying up all the comic book character rights and then holding a monopoly on that genre of entertainment? If not should such protection exist?

130 points by elorant 5y ago

0235005 5y ago

This hopefully seem like the beginning of the end for the Facebook monopoly and excessive acquisitons.

varelse 5y ago
In one corner, we have technologically behind the curve government bureaucrats and mediocre lawyers, in the other, we have bottomless pockets and the best lawyers money can buy... Fight!!!
- echelon 5y ago
  We seem to have forgotten victories like GDPR, CCPA, and the Microsoft anti-trust case. The Microsoft anti-trust case took the wind out of Microsoft's sails and kept the web free just long enough for new giants to emerge. (And Microsoft remains a 1T+ company. If anything, it made them stronger because they had to diversify and fight harder.) If we (or Europe) try it again, we might see more wealth in more companies. More experiments. More innovation. Less moat defending, taxation, walled gardens, and comprehensive surveillance dragnets. Having Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon own everything makes them all complacent iterators, data hoarders, tax collectors, and small business/innovation cripplers. The anti-trust hammer is a powerful tool. It elevated our entire industry. We (through our elected officials) should wield it.
  - varelse 5y ago
    Yeah good luck with that Outlook. I think Steve Ballmer is the one who knocked the wind out of the sails and the sales of Microsoft more than the antitrust lawsuit but maybe I'm just crazy. My own experience with Microsoft during the naughts was shortly after having unified Windows NT and consumer Windows through Windows XP, they scrapped it for a glorified CPU/GPU hardware land grab called Vista. And everything sucked again for another 5 years 100% unnecessarily. As for GDPR and CCPA. Yeah, thanks a whole hell of a lot. The tech companies are just as creepy as they ever were, but now I have to fill out a form to acknowledge how creepy they are. So privacy, very security. Go split Amazon into Amazon retail and Amazon Web Services. Go split Microsoft into Microsoft OS, Microsoft gaming, Microsoft office, and Microsoft Cloud Computing. Go smash Google into 10 or more independent companies. Pull any one of those things off and I'll be impressed. Otherwise it's all sound and fury to me but I guess it keeps the bureaucrats gainfully employed and off the streets so there's that. The funny part is that the whole Microsoft antitrust thing was about Internet Explorer, which was always a crap-tastic web browser, and it has now more or less died off of natural causes because Google outcroptasticed them and Mozilla, despite abundant internal funding, squandered it all.
missedthecue 5y ago
What exactly does Facebook have a monopoly on?
- croes 5y ago
  Social network in large parts of the world.
- mishafb 5y ago
  Messaging, in my country. SMS isn't a thing here, WhatsApp is used by literally everyone.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Is it a monopoly in the sense that everyone is forced to use it and Facebook is able to charge high fees, or do people have multiple options on the app store (signal, telegram, etc) and they just choose Whatsapp

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

>The CMA provisionally found that Facebook’s ownership of Giphy could lead it to deny other platforms access to its GIFs It's GIFs? Since when did Giphy own anything that it distributes. The idea that gifs are centralized is absurd.

rvz 5y ago
Yeah. It sounds like a terrible argument. I'm sure the same Gifs are available on Imgur and gfycat.com as well.
stirfish 5y ago
>Since when did Giphy own anything that it distributes. Copyright law confuses me too.

pg_bot 5y ago

This seems like retaliation for the success of their previous acquisitions of instagram and whatsapp. GIFs are not a money maker, and almost anyone could build a competitor to giphy without hassle. There's no secret sauce, none of their content is protectable, and there's no moat that can protect whatever advantage they have. Plus it sounds like their business was already under duress, so why block an acquisition for any other reason than spite or incompetence?

mschuster91 5y ago
Facebook already has way too much power over the data of way too many citizens, and they continue to buy up data lakes left and right. This is what is upsetting European regulators and anti-trust agencies. The article quotes the CMA: > Alternatively, it could change the terms of this access – for example, Facebook could require Giphy customers, such as TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat, to provide more user data in order to access Giphy GIFs. Such actions could increase Facebook’s market power, which is already significant. And then, as if to show that the author hasn't understood a tiny bit of the issue at hand, he writes: > Putting aside the logic that someone would switch to using Facebook because of GIFs (I love GIFs as much as the next person, but come on), the CMA argues that Giphy was in the process of building up an ads business that would have competed with Facebook. It's not "building an ads business", the issue the CMA has is that everyone and their dog, including people not on Facebook, uses Giphy - which means that if Facebook were to buy Giphy they could scoop up an awful lot of data.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
emodendroket 5y ago
Spite and/or sending a message/being seen to send a message to Facebook seem like likely factors.
somehnacct3757 5y ago
I always thought it was because Giphy is integrated into a bunch of mobile keyboards and third party chat services. These services would never integrate a Facebook gif service because of the implication. So giphy's entire valuation lies in being a trojan horse for an established surveillance capitalist.

lloydatkinson 5y ago

Good. Many services use giphy and I don’t want to need a Facebook account to use gifs.

berkes 5y ago
Even if you can keep using it without such an account, it is another datasource for Facebook. Another way to track you in your daily use of tech.
evad3r 5y ago
I wouldn't see them enforcing needing a Facebook account, in the same way that you don't need a Facebook account to use Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp. That's almost worse in a way.
isoskeles 5y ago
I believe they’re just going to log your IP and sell that data to other companies. If someone posts a gif from Giphy in my Slack workspace, FB could sell my IP and Slack metadata to anyone else, and then I probably start seeing ads (if I’m not using uBlock for some reason) for B2B stuff related to my job. Maybe if a gif gets posted to “#engineering” they show me Software Engineer job ads.

the-dude 5y ago

"Facebook is allowed to buy Whatsapp if it does not merge the identities / keeps WA separate from FB" ( EU ). Well, what the heck. I thought they really said that. But this : https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_1088 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_... does not say so.

leros 5y ago

What happens if only the UK says this but the US allows it?

detaro 5y ago
What the US thinks is not really relevant to what UK regulators do. Facebook still has to deal with their actions one way or the other.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mrkramer 5y ago

Ok I'll try to be serious how exactly monopoly over GIFs would endanger users of social networks and industry in general? Except Facebook gathering your GIFs usage data. Facebook would know what GIFs you use that's a big problem isn't it?! Why did they allow acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp then? Makes zero sense to me. And if Facebook is not allowed to buy other social networks then Chinese will buy them. And then again we will be in the same situation just like we are with TikTok and Huawei. Data going to CCP and not to Corporate America. I prefer Corporate America over CCP to be honest.

barbazoo 5y ago
IP address and gif search term might be a valuable data point to add about a person.
- ljm 5y ago
  With the Slack integration, someone using `/giphy searchterm` will send over things like: slack enterprise ID, team ID, user ID, the team's domain, their name, the slack workspace's name, etc... Facebook could quite easily use that data to draw more connections between people. Who they work with, who they might know within the same teams and enterprises, etc. etc.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    No, that's incorrect. The giphy command is created by Slack and doesn't share any data with Giphy [1]. [1] https://medium.com/delta-cx/facebook-bought-giphy-but-doesnt-really-care-how-you-use-gifs-26e99514e5e7 https://medium.com/delta-cx/facebook-bought-giphy-but-doesnt...
    - crtasm 5y ago
      That says "...designed to give Giphy nearly zero data.", unclear what is still shared. Signal goes to great lengths to preserve privacy with their giphy integration: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/

Traster 5y ago

I think this is actually a great decision by the UK regulator. I'm not convinced it'll be effective, but I think it's the right move. You can't have the largest encumbent in a space start to hoover up its suppliers to the detriment of its competitors.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Based, beware of communist gangs.

menmob 5y ago

My only real experience with giphy was when I was assisting ArchiveTeam in saving some gifs thaf giphy was going to delete. They wouldn’t give us a list of gifs that would be deleted, despite saying they wanted to help us. So we hit their API to get what GIFs were needed after they gave us a go-ahead (I don’t entirely remember how much permission was given here- it’s been a while.). After maybe an hour of hitting them fast enough to get the information we needed to save the gifs before they were deleted (which really wasn’t that many IIRC. Maybe 50/sec?), the whole site went down. Later that evening, the CEO then threatened ArchiveTeam and got some bad press for suing some volunteers just trying to save some funny cat videos. It didn’t ever amount to much, and I think they reversed the decision to remove them anyway. Totally unrelated to the topic, but whenever someone mentions Giphy, this is all I can think about..

Tempest1981 5y ago

Recently discussed here: (4 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156656 (91 comments)

suifbwish 5y ago

A bit off topic but on a similar note is there anything protecting intellectual property monopolies? This may sound ridiculous but culture has a big impact on its host society. For hypothetical instance: Is there anything preventing big media corporations from buying up all the comic book character rights and then holding a monopoly on that genre of entertainment? If not should such protection exist?