Facebook shouldn't be allowed to buy Giphy, says UK regulator
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
They start learning who you're working with in Slack, and you start seeing them in your friends suggestions. I don't think there's any reason to expect that FB would act in any kind of good faith with this stuff - why else would you buy a gif hosting platform if not for the entrenched integrations and their access?
Well, what the heck. I thought they really said that. But this : https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_... does not say so.
That's almost worse in a way.
It's GIFs? Since when did Giphy own anything that it distributes.
The idea that gifs are centralized is absurd.
Copyright law confuses me too.
Fight!!!
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
[1] https://medium.com/delta-cx/facebook-bought-giphy-but-doesnt...
Signal goes to great lengths to preserve privacy with their giphy integration: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
The article basically says that Slack made a special case for Giphy, and so they decided that Giphy in particular doesn't get the same treatment as your typical slack bot or slash command.
So, all FB needs to do is block that integration and either force their own or negotiate a new setup with slack. "You have a command called giphy and giphy is our trademark, so stop."
The article you link to explains all of this, so I don't think you've refuted my point, really, except to say that it doesn't happen right now.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156656 (91 comments)