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Comment by benja123 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I don’t think this will end well for the regulator.

I am not a lawyer, but I am guessing that if Facebook blocks giphy usage in the UK there is very little the UK regulator can do to them. I see that as the likeliest scenario as they won’t want to sell giphy.

This will only make the regulator look foolish. The average person won’t understand why Facebook owning giphy is a problem (it’s not a social network) but they will be annoyed when they lose access to giphy in slack, WhatsApp and other platforms that use it in.

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What? How will blocking giphy in the UK help?

From the regulator “ Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy would reduce competition between social media platforms and that the deal has already removed Giphy as a potential challenger in the display advertising market”

So the finding is Facebook has too much control in the market. Blocking giphy just shows how much control they would have if the acquisition is completed. If anything, blocking giphy makes it worse.

Will this pan out well for the regulator? Who knows, who cares. But it shows if your business gets a bad reputation like Meta has, you’ll find regulators starting to kick you about.

> This will only make the regulator look foolish.

I'd say the opposite: If a regulator can't regulate something as trivial as a gif sharing website we might as well shut down the regulator, because they can't do shit.

The presupposition there is that regulating something trivial should be easy, and regulating something important should be hard. I would suggest exactly the opposite is what we should aim for.

So FB harms their UK business and gets a big fine. UK FB goes without GIFs - not a huge deal!

> without GIFs

I'd say they're not GIFs, they're embedded mini-websites with their own tracking cookies and JS and whatnot. If only they were GIFs.

Good point!

thats not how gifs work ffs

Giphy is much more than a GIF though. Here's a link for example: https://media0.giphy.com/media/mlvseq9yvZhba/giphy.gif

If you load it in a browser you get an entire HTML page full of spyware - it is not a GIF. They're detecting the user agent and deciding whether to send spyware or not - only curl'ing the link gives you the raw GIF by the looks of it.

How does blocking Giphy in the UK remediate the situation? If they don't want to sell Giphy, then I imagine the regulator will start fining them and seizing UK based assets, including any revenue they derive from UK companies, or via UK based banks and payment processors.

> I am not a lawyer ... This will only make the regulator look foolish.

Look in a mirror. Evading the regulator would require exiting the UK market entirely.

Blocking giphy does not solve anything, just means more fines or other action by the regulator.

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