Facebook shouldn't be allowed to buy Giphy, says UK regulator(theverge.com)
theverge.com
Facebook shouldn't be allowed to buy Giphy, says UK regulator
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/12/22621957/facebook-giphy-deal-blocked-uk-regulator
41 comments
A bit off topic but on a similar note is there anything protecting intellectual property monopolies? This may sound ridiculous but culture has a big impact on its host society.
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?
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?
Recently discussed here: (4 days ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156656 (91 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156656 (91 comments)
>The CMA provisionally found that Facebook’s ownership of Giphy could lead it to deny other platforms access to its GIFs
It's GIFs? Since when did Giphy own anything that it distributes.
The idea that gifs are centralized is absurd.
It's GIFs? Since when did Giphy own anything that it distributes.
The idea that gifs are centralized is absurd.
This hopefully seem like the beginning of the end for the Facebook monopoly and excessive acquisitons.
What exactly does Facebook have a monopoly on?
Messaging, in my country. SMS isn't a thing here, WhatsApp is used by literally everyone.
Is it a monopoly in the sense that everyone is forced to use it and Facebook is able to charge high fees, or do people have multiple options on the app store (signal, telegram, etc) and they just choose Whatsapp
Social network in large parts of the world.
In one corner, we have technologically behind the curve government bureaucrats and mediocre lawyers, in the other, we have bottomless pockets and the best lawyers money can buy...
Fight!!!
Fight!!!
We seem to have forgotten victories like GDPR, CCPA, and the Microsoft anti-trust case.
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.
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.
Yeah good luck with that Outlook. I think Steve Ballmer is the one who knocked the wind out of the sails and the sales of Microsoft more than the antitrust lawsuit but maybe I'm just crazy.
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.
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.
This seems like retaliation for the success of their previous acquisitions of instagram and whatsapp. GIFs are not a money maker, and almost anyone could build a competitor to giphy without hassle. There's no secret sauce, none of their content is protectable, and there's no moat that can protect whatever advantage they have. Plus it sounds like their business was already under duress, so why block an acquisition for any other reason than spite or incompetence?
Facebook already has way too much power over the data of way too many citizens, and they continue to buy up data lakes left and right. This is what is upsetting European regulators and anti-trust agencies.
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.
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.
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Spite and/or sending a message/being seen to send a message to Facebook seem like likely factors.
I always thought it was because Giphy is integrated into a bunch of mobile keyboards and third party chat services. These services would never integrate a Facebook gif service because of the implication. So giphy's entire valuation lies in being a trojan horse for an established surveillance capitalist.
That's my read on it: Facebook gets giphy, and they reach into all kinds of things they currently can't see. I'm sure the giphy integrations in slack, discord, telegram, etc. would become fresh sources of data depending on what the bot APIs give you in a request.
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?
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?
Completely agree with this take. It's unsettling.
Because Facebook has a habit of buying companies that cement their reach. When Google bought YouTube, they were a massively money-losing business. It is now one of the main properties that gives Google an actual advantage on the Web.
Good. Many services use giphy and I don’t want to need a Facebook account to use gifs.
I believe they’re just going to log your IP and sell that data to other companies. If someone posts a gif from Giphy in my Slack workspace, FB could sell my IP and Slack metadata to anyone else, and then I probably start seeing ads (if I’m not using uBlock for some reason) for B2B stuff related to my job. Maybe if a gif gets posted to “#engineering” they show me Software Engineer job ads.
I wouldn't see them enforcing needing a Facebook account, in the same way that you don't need a Facebook account to use Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp.
That's almost worse in a way.
That's almost worse in a way.
Even if you can keep using it without such an account, it is another datasource for Facebook. Another way to track you in your daily use of tech.
"Facebook is allowed to buy Whatsapp if it does not merge the identities / keeps WA separate from FB" ( EU ).
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.
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.
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Ok I'll try to be serious how exactly monopoly over GIFs would endanger users of social networks and industry in general? Except Facebook gathering your GIFs usage data. Facebook would know what GIFs you use that's a big problem isn't it?!
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.
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.
FB could track a lot more through Giphy just like they do with their like buttons.
It's too late to do something against the acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram but maybe they have learned that's a huge mistake to let FB acquire such services. They are not obliged to repeat their mistakes.
IP address and gif search term might be a valuable data point to add about a person.
With the Slack integration, someone using `/giphy searchterm` will send over things like: slack enterprise ID, team ID, user ID, the team's domain, their name, the slack workspace's name, etc...
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.
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.
No, that's incorrect. The giphy command is created by Slack and doesn't share any data with Giphy [1].
[1] https://medium.com/delta-cx/facebook-bought-giphy-but-doesnt...
[1] https://medium.com/delta-cx/facebook-bought-giphy-but-doesnt...
And at what point does FB use their considerable might to replace Slack's giphy bot with one that FB makes?
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.
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.
That says "...designed to give Giphy nearly zero data.", unclear what is still shared.
Signal goes to great lengths to preserve privacy with their giphy integration: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
Signal goes to great lengths to preserve privacy with their giphy integration: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
I think this is actually a great decision by the UK regulator. I'm not convinced it'll be effective, but I think it's the right move. You can't have the largest encumbent in a space start to hoover up its suppliers to the detriment of its competitors.
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..