Split up what, a declining social network for boomers?
You all love to point the finger at Facebook in this 90s evil Microsoft fashion. Well TikTok is erecting behind your back and they're no stranger to data selling and Chinesr govt affiliation.
Credit where credit is due, Meta / FB identified early on that people are moving on to mobile and acquired WhatsApp and Instagram at the right time (WhatsApp and Instagram are extremely popular with the young).
> WhatsApp and Instagram are extremely popular with the young
were. Then came Snapchat and later TikTok. Instagram is declining in users, meanwhile WhatsApp is a cross-generational norm in some countries for whatever reason (it has atrocious UX).
At the very least, FB, WhatsApp and Instagram should be separate companies. And WA is the world's most popular chat app by far, so this is not some unimportant bit player.
And my response to the article is that there are way bigger fish to fry than splitting up a dying social media conglomerate. Google and Amazon are far more powerful and dominant than Meta and you know it.
Sent from my Android phone through Chrome. BRB, I just got a package and I need to check my AWS config.
You sound kinda crazy, friend. It is possible for several things to matter at the same time. This article is about Facebook, so we're discussing Facebook.
It's possible for several things to happen, but there's a limited amount of resources that can be applied at a time. I don't think Facebook is the bigger picture.
>This article is about Facebook, so we're discussing Facebook
My subject, which was formed in my thread, is a response to the original post.
The dying social media conglomerate can be warmup before going after more powerful companies. Like a vaccine to stimulate the antitrust immune system, if you will.
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Force them to divest these companies, and then these companies can compete with each other in the open market.
>Split up what, a declining social network for boomers?
Regardless of the merits of the case, it's interesting to see that a UK watchdog is able to exert such power over a US corporation. There's more background here: https://taxjustice.net/2022/01/18/the-uk-is-breaking-up-face... – they seem to be giving Brexit the credit for UK regulators able to make independent decisions from the EU's own competition regulators
Which is of course complete nonsense and UK has had a competition regulator that was effective and able to operate independently of EU even before Brexit. Every EU country can set the rules what companies can operate in every member state and how, and obviously UK was always able to do this.
(For a simple example - look at France constantly fining and regulating US tech giants without having to ask Brussels for permission)
Fair enough. I was just going off of what Nick Shaxson, who seems to be quite smart on such matters, said in that post. I'm a remainer myself, so to find any sort of "benefit" in Brexit is very rare indeed.. ;-)
Willfully representing how the EU works is a longstanding tradition of UK media. The EU even has a dedicated page for debunking British tabloid media lies.
edit: sadly I can't find it now, newer post-truth issues like Covid-19 seem to drown it out in my search engines
The original URL was https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/ . It seems the EC itself pulled this page, and the live page now redirects to the above page which seems to contain blog-style entries for every item, rather than just a list of hyperlinks to all articles.
For three decades, the European Commission London Office’s ‘Euromyths’ initiative tried to shed light on the facts behind stories about the EU in the UK media [..] Those rebuttals are now digitalised and searchable on this archived site, alongside more recent material [..] We hope the site continues to be useful, at least as a historical record of how parts of the British media sometimes presented the EU and how the Commission responded.
This has been going on since way before the internet--Texas used to have de facto veto power over public school textbooks, because the Texas Board of Education (or whatever it was named) was the single largest buyer of textbooks. If you're a big enough buyer, then you start to claim some amount of monopsony power.
>"We will continue to evaluate opportunities – including through acquisition – to bring innovation and choice to more people in the UK and around the world."
How do the people writing this shite sleep at night?
Meta also has offices and thousands of employees in the UK. Presumably the UK government could ban them from operating in the UK completely which would be a pretty big hit to those employees and all the teams that are based there.
The UK doesn't need to block Facebook, they can just ban advertisers from buying any ad space on there. FB could still provide a service in the UK but it wouldn't make them any money.
> Why care what the UK has to say about US matters?
Because US regulators are too lazy/corrupt/starved to do the job they exist to do. Someone has to reign in oligopolies amassing even more power and dominance, and it obviously isn't going to be the US, so whoever wants to step in, be our collective guest. This time it was the UK, next up is the EU Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts.
And yes, there are much more pressing matters, which others are dealing with. A competition comission doesn't have other duties than to block such obvious abuses.
> Personally the fact that the US regulators aren't wasting time monitoring gif repo purchases is a good thing in my book.
Good thing they're spending that time productively... Not blocking any egregious merger/acquisition from the past decade?
> Quite a hyperbole for a gif repo purchase. Can FB purchase Tenor then? Who could purchase Giphy, any other social media giant?
Facebook, or any other social media giant, shouldn't be allowed to expand in distributors to their competitors. Giphy is used by everyone, Facebook tracking Telegram users isn't something anyone needs. Anyone can purchase Giphy as long as it doesn't give them an unfair advantage, so nobody in the chat market.
> This is all virtue signaling because they know certain people will eat it up.
It's funny that digital billboard space is the main reason they cite.
To me the much bigger threat was that Giphy had integrations into many other chat and messaging apps which Facebook also competes with. Buying Giphy gave them new insight into competitor usage. Facebook could see which chat apps you were using and who you were talking to on them. All they had to do was fingerprint the gifs you sent to your friends
> The regulator said Meta would be able to increase its “already significant market power” by cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals, or demand more user data from them in order to keep using Giphy.
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?
No, Giphy, GifyCat, Tenor and pretty much every other gif distribution service has already done something like this from the get go. The GIF is just not well suited for large scale distribution when html supports <video> elements that support non-garbage file formats. I would assume the current ruling is meant to cover 'gifs' as a broad term for looping short form video.
This is all the EUs fault. They were warned multiple times that they need to get home grown GIF supplies, instead of importing all their GIFs from the US or Russia.
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.
The phrase "cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals" may be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. I honestly can't believe someone wrote that in a legal opinion.
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.
This kind of barely surface level understanding by clueless bureaucrats (remember "a series of tubes"?) is generally what you sign up for when you ask for regulation in technology. It is the reason I am usually skeptical of such calls for legislation, because the end result could be worse than what we started with.
> The phrase "cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals" may be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. I honestly can't believe someone wrote that in a legal opinion.
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."
> 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.
From what I've seen, text. I've heard a lot of younger folks call gifs "cringe". It seems like a dead trend, even millennials I know have mostly stopped using them.
There's no real limit to the supply of gifs on the internet, and yet Meta spent $600m on a website hosting third party gifs that made almost zero revenue. I don't think they were going to get very far with arguments that nobody cares about gifs...
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.
> 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
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.
I question the value there. Who cares that someone likes Seinfeld clips with George? Is that worth anything at all? You can get basically that data from Experian anyway without all of the hassle.
I am under the impression that this is kind of true, though, in that you might think of Giphy as a massive pile of user content under dubious or illegitimate licensing, but it actually (ridiculously) is a repository of exclusively-licensed content that is contributed by such groups as motion picture companies (and which is then also what kind of led to the downfall of the concept, as the existence of Giphy and its narrow catalog of official gifs OK'd by marketing and legal departments started to feel stale).
It’s a library of content for a feature that’s considered table stakes for modern chat clients. If it wasn’t worth anything why would Facebook have paid so much for it?
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.
Nothing stops you from starting a new service for any sort of content library. The moat is in the content creation/curation, and in this case that content is centered around gifs.
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
Why would you even want to for gifs? The value seems super low compared to the effort. What value did gify even provide facebook? The data is probably next to worthless. Gifs in text chat seem like a fading fad, and are probably a bad user experience. The whole thing seems like a huge boondoggle, and the idea that it gives facebook any leverage anywhere is laughable.
I’m going to point towards Facebook spending 600 million to buy giphy and the regulators deciding this gave too much monopoly power to the point of requiring Meta to sell the business, as self evident proof that it’s valuable.
I get that you, personally, don’t value it but large organizations apparently do
I don’t think that proves that either Facebook or UK regulators are rational actors. I’m also not aware of any earnings reports from Facebook point to any return on that investment. It also doesn’t seem like there have been many gify copycats.
[*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.
This is kind getting tautological here when you’re saying that just because someone/some group values it doesn’t make it valuable, especially when we have two fairly large organizations involved.
I’d need your definition of what “valuable” is before we could have a useful conversation
It seems obvious to me that the value of any business deal could be measured in attributed revenue or movement in stock price. On both points, this deal looked like shit.
It could also be valued in its ability to prevent competition from forming and causing margins to fall in the protected area of business. Which happens to be what the regulators are looking to prevent.
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
Facebook doesn't own any of the gifs in giphy. So "cutting off the supply" doesn't really make sense. Lots of them could probably be considered copyright infringement if a company wanted to be litigious enough. I'm pretty sure they don't have a license for all the thousands of subtitled Star Wars clips you can find on there, for example.
Cutting off the easy to use single place for content can have the same affect on usage rates as actually legally limiting access. Most people on this forum work in an industry where it’s common knowledge that even an extra second of initial load time will drastically increase your bounce rate. The frictionless experience you get with giphy is part of the content curation that is the moat for them
Non sure why everyone is so happy to kill the remaining of big employer, in the crisis year. Facebook as social media kind is dying regardless of this giphy decision.
This is the funniest thing ever to me. Everyone who thinks about this for more than a moment realizes Giphy has never had any value at all. They might as well be licensing different types of burps.
If you think about it for more than 2 moments you will see that owning Giphy allows Facebook to see which chat apps you're using (via the api key for the app's Giphy integration) and who you're talking to on them (by attaching an id to each gif similar to how tracking pixels work in email.) Most chat clients automatically load images, triggering the tracker.
This gives Facebook unprecedented visibility into the user counts, usage patterns, and social graph of any chat app with a Giphy integration. These apps compete with Facebook's own chat apps.
Could you provide an example of a competitor app that integrates Giphy? It feels like a lot of people _think_ this is the explanation, but the chat apps I use defer gifs to the keyboard.
Discord has /giphy and Slack does as well, although Slack's is via addon. Slack considers this addon an Essential App which gives it top billing on their marketplace.
Giphy's primary functionality is pissing off people trying to use Google Image Search to find an actual .gif file only to find nothing but silent videos pretending to be gifs.
The best time to develop a Strategic GIF Stockpile would have been 20 years ago; the second best time is now. Horrors would await if our geopolitical adversaries gained the upper hand and had the ability to restrict our access to memetic weaponry during a time of crisis.
At first I thought Giphy might have been a UK company, but no. It's an American company founded in New York. Ignoring the merits of the judgement—ridiculous as they are—does no one sense terrible outreach in issuing a ruling on a merger about two companies which are in no way related to the country issuing it?
This has terrible repercussions for the American tech economy. Every big tech company would think twice before acquiring another company. What if years from now, EU rules that Adobe's acquisition of Figma was illegal and it should unwind it? Perhaps, this is one reason why Microsoft is choosing to home-grow clones of Notion[1] and Canva[2], instead of acquiring them. Maybe that's the path big tech would be forced to take from now on.
I wonder if Meta just isn't interested in fighting any more because Giphy isn't that valuable to them. Gif mania has ebbed. The court ruling is giving them a pretense to cut their losses and save face.
These companies operate int he UK and in the EU. Naturally, they must follow local laws and abide to local rulings, otherwise they are not allowed to operate. This is nothing new. GDPR is mandatory to all American companies that want to operate in the EU as well. What's the confusion?
I think by "big company" you probably mean those who do business in other countries. Doing business in other countries requires you to be subject to the decisions of they make if you want to do business there. I think if neither was doing business in the UK (I can only dream) there would be no case to answer.
I take it you've read the judgement in full and are familiar enough with EU competition laws to dismiss the evidentiary basis of the court's findings /s
This has no more repercussions for "American tech" than any other US company that has a business and tax presence in the EU. The EU has previously ordered Microsoft to sell Windows without Windows Media Player in EU markets. Yet Facebook still saw fit to open an office there.
> The EU has previously ordered Microsoft to sell Windows without Windows Media Player in EU markets. Yet Facebook still saw fit to open an office there.
There's a difference between a build tweak for another market, and a non-US country reaching into the US and blocking an acquisition of one US company by another.
I think the only one misunderstanding here is you.
Meta is operating in the UK. Just because it is an American company, they have a presence in the UK. The UK government is demanding they sell Giphy, they don't _HAVE_ to follow that demand, but they'll most likely be banned from operating in the UK, which to them is more valuable than keeping Giphy.
This is no different than a UK based company operating in the US and having the US tell them to sell a product they acquired similarly.
As a matter of fact, the US does this stuff all the time.
> I think the only one misunderstanding here is you.
You and I are talking. There's no "only one" as though there's a crowd of people present. Try and imagine you're not at the head of a baying mob.
I said that forcing a separate product to be sold in a territory by the rulers of that territory is very different to the rulers of a territory forcing the undoing of a merger in a totally different territory.
If you disagree, and think they're the same, then say why. If you don't disagree, then say that. Either way, please stop making points that I'm not even necessarily disagreeing with, but aren't relevant to what I'm saying?
Do you just like reading your own words, because that's a lot of words for yourself to keep saying "no that's not what I'm talking about" yet everyone who has come in has been on the same page, except you.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the three people who've said something along the same lines have also done it in a Dunning-Kruger-powered sardonic written tone.
does no one sense terrible outreach in issuing a ruling on a merger about two companies which are in no way related to the country issuing it
Its been a long time since the country of origin of an internet service like these mattered practically to the end-user, so no, no over-reach in that regard at all.
If Meta wants to not be subject to UK or EU rules, they could certainly stop doing business there…
Personally, I'm really tired of seeing good products get subsumed into these faceless conglomerates, watered down, then finally borg'd into some tiny feature in the corner of the main app. Plenty of good ideas get tossed in the bin by these companies because they don't make 7-figure revenues out of the gate instead of being allowed to make something that makes self-sustaining revenue as its own business.
If businesses are looking for a buyout, I'd appreciate some up-front notice that I'll have to look for another solution once their dream is attained instead of being slapped in the face with a "hey, we got bought, but we're sticking around!" to "uh, we lied, it's going away; you have a week to save any data, hope you're not on vacation" a few months later.
> If businesses are looking for a buyout, I'd appreciate some up-front notice that I'll have to look for another solution once their dream is attained instead of being slapped in the face with a "hey, we got bought, but we're sticking around!" to "uh, we lied, it's going away; you have a week to save any data, hope you're not on vacation" a few months later.
Your upfront notice is not paying for the service.
If you use it for free, the chances of buyout are high and you'll get this issue. Companies that don't need the buyout don't ever have this issue.
Sure. If they want the free tier to be a taste, then build it that way (see `sr.ht` for a service I believe to be doing this well though I don't use it personally). If it is sold as a loss-leader to capture "growth", that just sounds like bad business planning to me.
FWIW, I pay for the services I highly value (news sites, media, email, etc.), but other times there's just a gap of "free and mostly suitable" to "expensive and overkill" that's too hard to justify knowing that my contributions aren't going to prevent the first bucket from overloading the boat at some point and leaving "everyone" out to sea in the process.
I'd much rather see "sorry, we can't maintain the status quo into the future; we'll grandfather the early believers in at their current level (or some X% over their current usage up to whatever cap existed) and the free tier now has Y% fewer features so that we can continue to maintain what we do into the future" instead of "we sold out to Meta" leaving even paying customers holding the sadness that entails.
You do realize that the US applies that the same sort of regulatory business processes for overseas companies that wish to operate in the US.
In fact, the US "reach" into overseas trading including banking and other business processes is much more intrusive than any EU or non-US business regulation of US companies.
> Every big tech company would think twice before acquiring another company .
Great! As an American, I'm thrilled there are governments in the world that still place people & competition at a higher priority than Mark's wallet. My government has completely given up on the idea of anti-trust enforcement.
Meta is getting creamed by TikTok and the market in general without the need for regulation by European bureaucrats that you haven’t elected democratically.
They could just as easy create regulations which are impossible for startups to follow that actually cement big tech into power unintentionally
If you want more enforcement, vote in government in your own country. At least we might be able to fix that later.
What’s funny is they’ll end up selling it to some IAC-type conglomerate with a huge data brokering business, and far poorer security and privacy practices, but which will escape the eye of lazy regulators who will keep looking to target splashy American brand names to score political points.
Practically every website is vulnerable to an attacker scraping it. If you give people information it's hard to stop them from saving that information.
> Meta does have thousands of competent engineers, ensuring their data remains exactly where they want it to be
Meta's own employees testified that it would be impossible to enumerate and locate all the data they're either collecting or synthesizing about their users.
So you'll forgive me if I don't really believe you.
No. They testified that a single person wouldn't be able to.
> The court-appointed expert asked who at Facebook would be able to answer the question: where is all the information on a single user stored.
>
> "I don't believe there's a single person that exists who could answer that question. It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question," answered Zarashaw.
Frankly, that's a distinction without a difference.
A governance policy is only as good as your ability to identify and enumerate your data, their provenance, their location, access controls, etc.
If no one person can do that job, it means they aren't actually tracking that information in a way that it can be holistically assessed, audited, etc.
Going to the original article that Business Insider cribbed from (which, of course, elides a lot of fascinating detail, because BI isn't a news source, it's an aggregator for people without attention spans): https://theintercept.com/2022/09/07/facebook-personal-data-n...
We find that this is supported by an internal Facebook document where an insider stated that:
> “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’”
Which makes sense given one of their engineers noted:
> “It is rare for there to exist artifacts and diagrams on how those systems are then used and what data actually flows through them,”
With one specific example given regarding their ad tracking:
> “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the — where the data flows. I would be surprised if there’s even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively.”
So, to sum up: no one person can determine what data they're collecting. There is a profound lack of internal documentation and knowledge about how data is processed and where it flows. And Facebook themselves admits they can neither control nor explain how systems use that data.
And I'm supposed to believe that "Meta does have thousands of competent engineers, ensuring their data remains exactly where they want it to be"?
Plenty of folks who’ve worked at small startups that haven’t faced regulatory scrutiny can tell you about how poor the common data handling practices are relative to the major leagues.
e.g. unilateral write access (no multiparty approvals), no TTLs or deletion guarantees, overly broad access, stale / unmaintained ACLs, copies of production data all over the place, supply chain vulnerabilities, lack of mTLS / endpoint security, etc. etc.
The upside (for end users) of big brand names being big targets is they have a lot more to lose than your average startup that no one will remember when it folds and sells its data.
I’ve worked at Meta and I can imagine that other companies have worse security in general yeah. I think people here have a glamorous idea of how companies run security. Most companies don’t even have security teams.
Good. Further concentrations of markets subject to vertical integrations shouldn't be allowed. It's never in the consumer or market's interest to have a vertically integrated behemoth developing content exclusive for their platform (be it Disney or Microsoft).
First and foremost, the time for objecting to an acquisition should be before it closes, not after.
Second, forcing a company to "unbundle" like this is really an antritrust action and the bar for that should be pretty high. Objections to acquisitions can be done on potential issues. De-merging a company should pretty much be based on actual not potential violations (IMHO).
Third, all of this is over Giphy. There are alternatives (eg Tenor). This is not a market any company (other than maybe Apple and Google by virtue of owning the platform) can dominate. There's no network effect like there is with WhatsApp or Instagram. This was not a large company. Giphy was miniscule.
Fourth, creating a GIF keyboard and support in your apps is pretty easy. I imagine this is what Meta is going to do instead. So what's been achieved exactly?
Lastl, government power and attention is limited. Please let's use it for something useful. This doesn't affect anyone. This doesn't help anyone. Let's do things that do.
The CMA did object [0]; in fact it made an order preventing Meta/Facebook from continuing but the order was ignored. Meta/Facebook was fined as a result [1].
It's amazing how something as harmless as a .GIF gets weaponized by big tech and abused for things like 'sentiment analysis' and profiling of users. This is why we can't have nice things :(
Is it also illegal if giphy goes back to being an independent private company, but then Meta leases their IP for like 9999 years or something? Or are there similar (the same?) laws that prevent an arrangement like that?
182 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadYou all love to point the finger at Facebook in this 90s evil Microsoft fashion. Well TikTok is erecting behind your back and they're no stranger to data selling and Chinesr govt affiliation.
were. Then came Snapchat and later TikTok. Instagram is declining in users, meanwhile WhatsApp is a cross-generational norm in some countries for whatever reason (it has atrocious UX).
Sure, but what about Google and Amazon, you don't think they're bigger threats that UK's limited resources should be focused on first?
Sent from my Android phone through Chrome. BRB, I just got a package and I need to check my AWS config.
>This article is about Facebook, so we're discussing Facebook
My subject, which was formed in my thread, is a response to the original post.
>You sound kinda crazy, friend
Now you're just being emotionally immature.
>Split up what, a declining social network for boomers?
Yes, definitely yes. Competition is good, yes?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/google-acquires-gif-keyboard...
Unequivocally, yes.
>for owning Tenor too?
No, not specifically for that.
(For a simple example - look at France constantly fining and regulating US tech giants without having to ask Brussels for permission)
edit: sadly I can't find it now, newer post-truth issues like Covid-19 seem to drown it out in my search engines
But yes, you're otherwise entirely correct. Our country has been lied to for decades in this regard particularly. Well done them, I guess?
What surprises me the most is how entrenched that industry is, like it's impossible to get rid of them.
The original URL was https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/ . It seems the EC itself pulled this page, and the live page now redirects to the above page which seems to contain blog-style entries for every item, rather than just a list of hyperlinks to all articles.
But the original full list is still available via the wayback machine as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20160329163353/https://blogs.ec....
For three decades, the European Commission London Office’s ‘Euromyths’ initiative tried to shed light on the facts behind stories about the EU in the UK media [..] Those rebuttals are now digitalised and searchable on this archived site, alongside more recent material [..] We hope the site continues to be useful, at least as a historical record of how parts of the British media sometimes presented the EU and how the Commission responded.
How do the people writing this shite sleep at night?
We need to also stop the Figma and Adobe sale as well, we cannot allow this anti-competitive sale to go through.
Especially about whether a social media company can own a meme gif repo...
There's got to be much more pressing matters for them right?
Because the UK could ban Meta from operating there if it didn't comply.
I guess UK does already have a firewall with it's nanny-state porn filters though.
I can see it now, "All of UK blocked FB today because of meme gif service purchase" Great headline, wonderful use of regulation /s
Meanwhile you have actual problems going on and a crashing economy, but at least we prevented a meme service from being bought!
I would hope they wouldn't do that to their own people. You're not really hurting FB, you're hurting your own citizens.
Is that really the best use of regulation, political power, etc?
Can FB buy Tenor then? Is any gif service off limits?
Who can buy Giphy? Any other social media?
So for example, Apple US couldn't buy ads on Facebook, because it shows ads to UK users? How do you envisage this working?
I was replying to this. If they can still show non-UK ads to UK residents then they can still make money.
They'd fine them. American courts generally recognize British judgements [1].
[1] https://harrisbricken.com/blog/recognition-of-foreign-judgme...
Because US regulators are too lazy/corrupt/starved to do the job they exist to do. Someone has to reign in oligopolies amassing even more power and dominance, and it obviously isn't going to be the US, so whoever wants to step in, be our collective guest. This time it was the UK, next up is the EU Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts.
And yes, there are much more pressing matters, which others are dealing with. A competition comission doesn't have other duties than to block such obvious abuses.
Personally the fact that the US regulators aren't wasting time monitoring gif repo purchases is a good thing in my book.
> Someone has to reign in oligopolies amassing even more power and dominance
Quite a hyperbole for a gif repo purchase. Can FB purchase Tenor then? Who could purchase Giphy, any other social media giant?
This is all virtue signaling because they know certain people will eat it up.
Good thing they're spending that time productively... Not blocking any egregious merger/acquisition from the past decade?
> Quite a hyperbole for a gif repo purchase. Can FB purchase Tenor then? Who could purchase Giphy, any other social media giant?
Facebook, or any other social media giant, shouldn't be allowed to expand in distributors to their competitors. Giphy is used by everyone, Facebook tracking Telegram users isn't something anyone needs. Anyone can purchase Giphy as long as it doesn't give them an unfair advantage, so nobody in the chat market.
> This is all virtue signaling because they know certain people will eat it up.
Who are those certain people?
To me the much bigger threat was that Giphy had integrations into many other chat and messaging apps which Facebook also competes with. Buying Giphy gave them new insight into competitor usage. Facebook could see which chat apps you were using and who you were talking to on them. All they had to do was fingerprint the gifs you sent to your friends
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)
As an Amish idk how to feel about this.
I've never found this to be the case, people are generally curious and courteous.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Ety...
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.
What do they use instead?
Maybe we can expect text emoticons (the ones with a hyphen for a nose) making a comeback soon.
:-)
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.
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
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.
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
This gives Facebook unprecedented visibility into the user counts, usage patterns, and social graph of any chat app with a Giphy integration. These apps compete with Facebook's own chat apps.
It would be more difficult to think of a popular chat app that doesn’t easily have Giphy available.
Actually a good use of tech, does google image search allow searching silent videos ?
This has terrible repercussions for the American tech economy. Every big tech company would think twice before acquiring another company. What if years from now, EU rules that Adobe's acquisition of Figma was illegal and it should unwind it? Perhaps, this is one reason why Microsoft is choosing to home-grow clones of Notion[1] and Canva[2], instead of acquiring them. Maybe that's the path big tech would be forced to take from now on.
[1]: https://medium.com/geekculture/microsoft-loop-clones-notion-...
[2]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-announces-canva-comp...
I agree with your sentiment, but this seems like a good outcome.
Then replace America which the country name of your choosing.
This is the UK making decision of how Meta must act with respect to non-UK citizens and in areas other than the UK.
This has no more repercussions for "American tech" than any other US company that has a business and tax presence in the EU. The EU has previously ordered Microsoft to sell Windows without Windows Media Player in EU markets. Yet Facebook still saw fit to open an office there.
There's a difference between a build tweak for another market, and a non-US country reaching into the US and blocking an acquisition of one US company by another.
You seem surprised that UK law holds in the UK.
Then you've misunderstood.
Meta is operating in the UK. Just because it is an American company, they have a presence in the UK. The UK government is demanding they sell Giphy, they don't _HAVE_ to follow that demand, but they'll most likely be banned from operating in the UK, which to them is more valuable than keeping Giphy.
This is no different than a UK based company operating in the US and having the US tell them to sell a product they acquired similarly.
As a matter of fact, the US does this stuff all the time.
You and I are talking. There's no "only one" as though there's a crowd of people present. Try and imagine you're not at the head of a baying mob.
I said that forcing a separate product to be sold in a territory by the rulers of that territory is very different to the rulers of a territory forcing the undoing of a merger in a totally different territory.
If you disagree, and think they're the same, then say why. If you don't disagree, then say that. Either way, please stop making points that I'm not even necessarily disagreeing with, but aren't relevant to what I'm saying?
Has the US actually tried to block a corporate merger between two non-American companies before?
Its been a long time since the country of origin of an internet service like these mattered practically to the end-user, so no, no over-reach in that regard at all.
It's really pretty easy to understand.
There is no way in which this is "terrible outreach", it's literally "you want to operate in our market? obey our rules."
Personally, I'm really tired of seeing good products get subsumed into these faceless conglomerates, watered down, then finally borg'd into some tiny feature in the corner of the main app. Plenty of good ideas get tossed in the bin by these companies because they don't make 7-figure revenues out of the gate instead of being allowed to make something that makes self-sustaining revenue as its own business.
If businesses are looking for a buyout, I'd appreciate some up-front notice that I'll have to look for another solution once their dream is attained instead of being slapped in the face with a "hey, we got bought, but we're sticking around!" to "uh, we lied, it's going away; you have a week to save any data, hope you're not on vacation" a few months later.
Your upfront notice is not paying for the service.
If you use it for free, the chances of buyout are high and you'll get this issue. Companies that don't need the buyout don't ever have this issue.
FWIW, I pay for the services I highly value (news sites, media, email, etc.), but other times there's just a gap of "free and mostly suitable" to "expensive and overkill" that's too hard to justify knowing that my contributions aren't going to prevent the first bucket from overloading the boat at some point and leaving "everyone" out to sea in the process.
I'd much rather see "sorry, we can't maintain the status quo into the future; we'll grandfather the early believers in at their current level (or some X% over their current usage up to whatever cap existed) and the free tier now has Y% fewer features so that we can continue to maintain what we do into the future" instead of "we sold out to Meta" leaving even paying customers holding the sadness that entails.
In fact, the US "reach" into overseas trading including banking and other business processes is much more intrusive than any EU or non-US business regulation of US companies.
Though I can’t recall any specific times where the US blocked the acquisition/merger between two European countries.
Great! As an American, I'm thrilled there are governments in the world that still place people & competition at a higher priority than Mark's wallet. My government has completely given up on the idea of anti-trust enforcement.
They could just as easy create regulations which are impossible for startups to follow that actually cement big tech into power unintentionally
If you want more enforcement, vote in government in your own country. At least we might be able to fix that later.
Poorer than Meta? Is that even possible?
do they, aye? https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security/meta-probe-533-...
Meta's own employees testified that it would be impossible to enumerate and locate all the data they're either collecting or synthesizing about their users.
So you'll forgive me if I don't really believe you.
> The court-appointed expert asked who at Facebook would be able to answer the question: where is all the information on a single user stored. > > "I don't believe there's a single person that exists who could answer that question. It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question," answered Zarashaw.
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-doesnt-know-where-all-y...
A governance policy is only as good as your ability to identify and enumerate your data, their provenance, their location, access controls, etc.
If no one person can do that job, it means they aren't actually tracking that information in a way that it can be holistically assessed, audited, etc.
Going to the original article that Business Insider cribbed from (which, of course, elides a lot of fascinating detail, because BI isn't a news source, it's an aggregator for people without attention spans): https://theintercept.com/2022/09/07/facebook-personal-data-n...
We find that this is supported by an internal Facebook document where an insider stated that:
> “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’”
Which makes sense given one of their engineers noted:
> “It is rare for there to exist artifacts and diagrams on how those systems are then used and what data actually flows through them,”
With one specific example given regarding their ad tracking:
> “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the — where the data flows. I would be surprised if there’s even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively.”
So, to sum up: no one person can determine what data they're collecting. There is a profound lack of internal documentation and knowledge about how data is processed and where it flows. And Facebook themselves admits they can neither control nor explain how systems use that data.
And I'm supposed to believe that "Meta does have thousands of competent engineers, ensuring their data remains exactly where they want it to be"?
Please.
Plenty of folks who’ve worked at small startups that haven’t faced regulatory scrutiny can tell you about how poor the common data handling practices are relative to the major leagues.
e.g. unilateral write access (no multiparty approvals), no TTLs or deletion guarantees, overly broad access, stale / unmaintained ACLs, copies of production data all over the place, supply chain vulnerabilities, lack of mTLS / endpoint security, etc. etc.
The upside (for end users) of big brand names being big targets is they have a lot more to lose than your average startup that no one will remember when it folds and sells its data.
Meta is essentially a surveillance company, with the incredible caveat that they no longer know what data they're collecting.
First and foremost, the time for objecting to an acquisition should be before it closes, not after.
Second, forcing a company to "unbundle" like this is really an antritrust action and the bar for that should be pretty high. Objections to acquisitions can be done on potential issues. De-merging a company should pretty much be based on actual not potential violations (IMHO).
Third, all of this is over Giphy. There are alternatives (eg Tenor). This is not a market any company (other than maybe Apple and Google by virtue of owning the platform) can dominate. There's no network effect like there is with WhatsApp or Instagram. This was not a large company. Giphy was miniscule.
Fourth, creating a GIF keyboard and support in your apps is pretty easy. I imagine this is what Meta is going to do instead. So what's been achieved exactly?
Lastl, government power and attention is limited. Please let's use it for something useful. This doesn't affect anyone. This doesn't help anyone. Let's do things that do.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/facebook-inc-giphy-inc-merger-i...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/facebook-inc-giphy-inc-merger-i...