I’m imagining a future in which Meta cuts off the winter supply of GIFs to the European Union, setting the populace into a restive period of incoherent communication.
Perhaps the EU, UK, and US should establish strategic (inter)national GIF reserves?
And now that the pipeline for dashcam videos is gone, what do they have? Nothing but a few PNGs that they sadly try to animate in a poor imitation of a GIF.
(sarcasm gif goes here)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Ety...
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format
As an Amish idk how to feel about this.
I've never found this to be the case, people are generally curious and courteous.
To me this smacks of our leaders, broadly, in the West being too old and too far removed from how people operate and live in the world today. This is like Lindsey Graham, who was once on the senate technology committee, admitting that he had never sent an email in 2015. Truly mind boggling.
I would very much doubt that was the actual wording, that's most likely a paraphrasing by the author of this article. The final report is not released yet, but according to the summary pdf linked from https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/facebook-inc-giphy-inc-merger-i... the phrasing is likely to be closer to "On this basis, we consider that Facebook would also have an incentive to foreclose its rivals from access to GIPHY."
That seems like a slightly more intelligent wording of the same bad argument to me. There’s no real limit on the supply of gifs on the internet, and they aren’t really in particularly high demand. In fact they’re already falling out of fashion with younger users. You’ll be hard pressed to find many people under 25 using them at all.
One the other hand, the owner of Giphy absolutely does get to limit which websites get to continue displaying the gifs that several years' of their user-generated content backlinked to Giphy.com
Not surprising that some bodies think the party making that decision shouldn't be Meta.
I guess my question would be so what? You can cache them on your own system, if you wanted. However, I doubt historical shit posts and reaction gifs have any real value to anyone. Frankly it seems laughable that Facebook paid $660m for Gify in the first place.
It's another vector for collecting user analytics.
What do they use instead?
Maybe we can expect text emoticons (the ones with a hyphen for a nose) making a comeback soon.
:-)
I'm not so sure about that. I rarely see anyone using them anymore and have read reports that usage is declining. Even if it is table stakes, nothing stops you from rendering gifs without gify integration.
If you want to get really reductive we could point towards any sort of content based business on the internet as merely moving files over http/https but I don’t think anyone would find it reasonable to compare Netflix and Kindle’s book library as competing in the same market
I get that you, personally, don’t value it but large organizations apparently do
[*edit] I'd also add that Facebook's share price dropped 15% the month the original deal was announced, and took two months to recover. It seems like the market agreed that it was a bad deal.
I’d need your definition of what “valuable” is before we could have a useful conversation
This wouldn’t cause a bump in revenue or stock price unless this broke the equilibrium and let the controlling firm take more of the market. If it’s a defensive measure it’s just increased cost to maintain revenue, but that still can be worth it if actual competition is expected to drop margins enough to exceed the cost of the defensive measure
Content licensing does. Try creating an alternative streaming platform that has the entire Netflix library and see how quickly you get shut down.
Facebook can't sue you if you create a rival gif service. None of the value is in their "content". All the value is in the search and ui
I'm pretty sure that value is approximately $0.