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Comment by taxyz23 | Hacker News Reader

I guess I don't get it. This is based on speculative misuse - that FB may in the future deny access to Giphy to competitors. So if you own a tool that your competitors may use then that's anti-competitive? Seems like that could apply to a lot of companies. Why not wait for actual misuse and base a case on that?

Also what's so special about Giphy? Seems it could be duplicated fairly easily by any serious competitor.

And competition being defined as other social media platforms? Pretty broad definition.

Seems FB hatred is making bad law. And that bad law will bite others not just FB.

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> Also what's so special about Giphy? Seems it could be duplicated fairly easily by any serious competitor.

You're right, a reasonable regulator following the U.S. anti-trust regulations as they were written in the early 1900s would also require Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook to all be cordoned off into separate companies at a minimum.

Great, lets get on it then

I also think if we're being charitable, AWS would be split off from Amazon, and possibly sub-divided further, likewise for the other public clouds -- Google search and Google Cloud shouldn't be owned by the same entity, etc.

How so?

Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp is essentially them buying out their competition.

Google running a cloud service is more like renting out excess capacity – which is quite common across industries. Plus there's a lot of competition in the cloud space.

There's a clear conflict of interest when owning the platform and services on top of it.

You'll be <<very>> tempted to do things to the platform to favor your own services.

The incentives are so strong I don't think we've even invented things to prevent this on a long enough time scale.

Yeah, a charitable reading of the old trust-busting laws and the motivations behind them would suggest that something like a search engine company should not have any products other than the search engine itself, lest there be a massive conflict of interest. If you have an interest in receiving incoming web traffic, you have a conflict of interest if you also own a search engine (or online advertising network, for that matter).

> Google running a cloud service is more like renting out excess capacity

If that were actually the case, then sure.

But it's not. Alphabet's Google Cloud services have whole data centers dedicated to renting to the public and Alphabet's Google and other businesses entities are their own customer.

Not an expert in the law or in this case, but blocking large companies from acquiring other companies which operate in the same space in order to cement monopolies is a pretty fundamental part of what a competition regulator is there for, it's hardly "bad law" or some arbitrary campaign against facebook

How is giphy “the same space”?

Giphy had an advertisement network that was based around gifs. Facebook shut down that advertisement network when they bought Giphy and rolled their own ads instead.

Mate, the whole article is 11 sentences, including the bit that explains what a gif is, and 2 of those 11 sentences answer your question

Giphy is already integrated in lots of juicy places that Facebook could never get an integration with their current reputation and competitors. A gif embed service, from a business perspective, is a tracking pixel generator.

So Facebook is buying the ability to see who you talk to in android keyboards, slack, discord, etc

That isn't how it works. Giphy/Facebook cannot see what is going on in your Slack channel just because you posted one of their GIFs.

They can't see the content of the Slack channel. But they can absolutely correlate the web request that loads the GIF with the other (illicitly-collected) data they have on you and have an even better signal on who you are, which companies/people you talk to, etc.

All they can see is that a user on slack.com is requesting the GIF. If you are using the Slack desktop app there's no other session to correlate it to.

The IP address and user-agent is enough of a session over time (remember that it loads every time you open your client as long as the GIF is in your recent history, so you get multiple data points to refine your search). Cookies or browser-specific state is on its way out anyway as more and more browsers impose restrictions.

Couldn't Giphy uniquely identify a gif when you post it to a channel, and when the reader(s) fetch said gif, fb could reconstruct the graph of channel/chat participants?

Heck, it's worse than that.

We're talking about GIFs. You know, short messages, memes, practically short text messages. They can literally extract context from those conversations, if a decent enough amount of them are used in the same place.

That would actually be quite a cool machine learning exercise.

for a very particular definition of "cool" that IMHO should be retired asap.

Absolutely. Slack channel URL crossed with IPs that pulled the GIF then profile via user agents and other fingerprinting that tied it to known Facebook accounts.

They’ll know exactly who is in every single slack channel together, discord server, subreddit, etc etc.

> Also what's so special about Giphy? Seems it could be duplicated fairly easily by any serious competitor.

Just cause its easily duplicated doesn't mean others can compete. You can easily duplicate Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. But unless you are as big as Facebook, you will not be about to compete. Its called network effect.

If Telegram shows anything, you can.

hehe, yea!

tg value proposition is based around a superior user experience, that's what competition is all about.

Telegram was launched 8 years ago. By a Russian billionaire.

Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram have ~3 billion users and Telegram only has 500 million, after FB has been under constant attack for about 3 years and Telegram has received a ton of free advertising as a result.

If you call that easy (after all, that what the comment you were replying to was asking), then everything in this life is easy. Heck, getting resurrected is probably "easy".

I don't call it easy, I call it possible.

But it's just gifs. Not social network like other examples.

> But it's just gifs. Not social network like other examples.

When you send gifs to someone, that gif can be tracked. Which means, it can be monetized like other social networks. In fact, their business model is exactly like other social networks.

The acquisition was announced 18 months ago and the regulators have only just announced that there's a problem. That's about how long it takes to make a decision like this.

If FB wanted to use Giphy to squash an upstart competitor, 18 months is plenty of time to accomplish it. So regulators preemptively forbid some kinds of abusable power, especially when the company has abused its monopoly power in the past.

It would be better if regulators could act fast only when needed, but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.

> The acquisition was announced 18 months ago and the regulators have only just announced that there's a problem. That's about how long it takes to make a decision like this.

It's about as long as it takes to figure out that Facebook didn't grease enough palms in order to let this pass muster, and won't be shelling out any more, so they're going to make it public, in the hopes it will spur Facebook to reconsider.

This is as predictable as the dance a company does when they have to fire an executive for shameful behavior, and the resulting PR to-do list dealing with the press and investors.

>Also what's so special about Giphy? Seems it could be duplicated fairly easily by any serious competitor.

They're not buying it for the tech, they're buying it for the user base so they can sell their data to advertisers.

Doesn't Giphy also have rights-agreements with major movie studios - thus allowing their users to exchange clips of copyrighted content without fear of litigation (something about Giphy persuading litigious studios that allowing clips is basically free marketing)?

Don't know what Giphy has, but creating and sharing a gif from a movie would be fair use and not subject to copyright.

You're not going to watch a movie in gif format, and it would be a derivative anyway.

Sure as an individual, but a movie studio would absolutely go after a company that is in the business of indexing, hosting and serving clips from their movies.

I suspect this is why Giphy got that license. And I bet it comes with some terms like allowing studios to remove GIFs they don't like, etc..

> And I bet it comes with some terms like allowing studios to remove GIFs they don't like, etc..

Y'ever noticed how the "send a GIF" panels in apps (often using Giphy behind-the-scenes as whitelabel) often have the top few rows of "trending" (quotes intentional) GIFs are mostly taken from recent major Hollywood releases? Most of the time it's whatever the most recent Marvel MCU film was - or some other mass-market action film - so if not the MCU then it'll be from whatever Disney's latest Star Wars movie or TV show just-so-happens to be.

...so yeah, that's very likely paid product placement right there. Not only is it free advertising for Marvel, but it's advertising that people actually want to share with each other!

Of course, what gives Giphy its credibility with net-savvy users is that they let people upload and cut their own GIFs. If you instead imagine Giphy as just being a free, maybe even banner ad-free, repository of GIFs but was strictly read-only (maybe have a likes system?) and comprised of only rightsholder-approved GIFs (but imagine the selection was still substantial so 75%+ of the time you'd still be able to find the right reaction GIF for your situation: it's just it'd all be the same well-known actors playing the same roles in all the same kinds of films and TV shows; no user-generated-content or really any material that isn't owned by a Fortune 500 media company) - but would people still use it? I think they would - especially if the E2E user-experience quality is there... as opposed to most other kinds of sites that do tolerate their users committing acts of copyright violation, but plaster the site in the worst online ads of all (because most of their users are smart enough to be offended by homogenized and consolidated entertainment media then they're going to be smart enough to run adblock too).

Disney Co is now at the point where they can choose to give Giphy a sweet deal (e.g. a covenant not to sue or even an explicit copyright license, provided Giphy promotes pro-Disney GIFs) and use Giphy not necessarily for their own direct benefit (i.e. GIFs as advertising new films), but to choose to actively support, fund and promote Giphy to ensure Giphy stays the default place for GIF editing and exchange, but because Disney then effectively "owns" Giphy, they can shut-off and shut-out promotion for all other non-Disney franchises just to ensure Disney laps up people's mindshare and imaginations: soon, in a few decades, Disney will own the rights to all new original thoughts.

Yes agreed there is also paid placement for sure.

Fair use is not a global concept.

Fair use isn't that cut and dry, it depends on how much of the work you're using, what you're using it for, how much you transformed it, etc.

It's really not "well it's only a gif, you can't touch me".

Fair use really depends on, well, the use. If you were to take a 5s clip from a movie and use it as a commercial for your product, you would almost certainly not be within fair use rights.

So, even more guaranteed users ?

Which is fine, they're an advertising company. At the moment that regulators say that it's okay for Facebook to exist and operate the way they do -- collecting and organizing data to use for ad targeting, you can't really be on a high-horse about them doing that.

And also to prevent it from growing in such a way that it could threaten existing Meta properties. This is the typical behavior in monopolies these days, get big enough to simply buy out any potential competition. Seems like the UK has had enough.

> I guess I don't get it. This is based on speculative misuse - that FB may in the future deny access to Giphy to competitors. So if you own a tool that your competitors may use then that's anti-competitive? Seems like that could apply to a lot of companies. Why not wait for actual misuse and base a case on that?

On the face of it this sounds reasonable but doesn't work in practice.

Precisely what service do they have to offer? What quality standards. How much can they charge? Do they have to innovate or can they let it stagnate. How do you police it? If FB want to limit the service they will (and they have a history in this area).