Comment by alanlammiman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alanlammiman | Hacker News Reader

My company runs one of the top iPhone apps for creating & exporting stickers to WhatsApp (and iMessage, Telegram & others). When WhatsApp started accepting animated stickers, we implemented the Giphy API to allow users to get GIFs and export them as animated stickers to WhatsApp (yes, from one Facebook product to another). Giphy rejected our application and blocked our API access claiming that their API Terms of Service prohibited what we were doing, which they did not in fact appear to do (we had read the terms before going to the trouble of implementing). No point arguing as the terms do say that they reserve the right to deny or revoke access at any time (in line with the CMA's concerns). So we just switched to Google's Tenor and ironically that has worked fine. Perhaps I should be writing a letter to the CMA!

You absolutely should!

Something bodies like the CMA often struggle to get is the "evidence of harm" which validates their concerns.

Your story is a real example of a competitor or business actor being harmed in precisely the way the CMA hypothesised. It's absolutely worth writing a response to them, explaining your story and what happened, and whether you support their proposed remedy.

Facebook and all their lobbyist friends will be submitting responses saying they entirely disagree and this action will cripple the digital economy and nobody will gain from it. You can explain how you are a rival in the ecosystem, and were actively harmed by their actions that the CMA has hypothesised could happen. Having people affected get in touch and do this can really help the CMA to justify standing firm with their findings in the face of the lobbyist doomsayers.

It took me a few minutes to figure this out since I hadn't RTFA yet, but in this context,

CMA = Competition and Markets Authority (a UK regulatory body)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_and_Markets_Author...

That's such an asinine decision. They're gifs, ffs!

Please take the effort to document this and write the CMA.

If you do, I'll send you $100. I know that's not much, but this is important and worth the effort.

> Perhaps I should be writing a letter to the CMA!

You should. These kind of situations are exactly what they'll need to show to move this forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com