(and considering expanding to other countries, including the U.K.), which it said had the potential to compete with Facebook’s ad services.
In the summer, the watchdog had also said it was concerned about the impact on digital “display” advertising - as Giphy had, pre-merger, been offering paid advertising services in the U.S. Way to go, time to move on from garden variety theories like it’s still 2012. In the spirit of “raising rivals’ costs”. “After consulting with interested businesses and organizations - and assessing alternative solutions (known as ‘remedies’) put forward by Facebook - the CMA has concluded that its competition concerns can only be addressed by Facebook selling Giphy in its entirety to an approved buyer,” the CMA wrote in a press release.Įspecially good one of the theories of harm is more #data_extraction from other services. The CMA appears to have held to its concern on the risk of competitive harm through data extraction from other services, as well as from other more obvious risks - such as Facebook shutting off rivals’ access to the platform - hence rejecting all the tech giant’s proposed alternative “remedies” to selling Giphy as insufficient. The regulator’s concern was not only that Facebook might simply deny rivals access to Giphy content for their users to reshare but that the data-mining giant might change the terms of access - and could, for example, require rivals like TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat to provide it with more user data in order to access Giphy GIFs. The CMA’s preliminary report on the Facebook-Giphy acquisition, this August, concluded that Facebook’s takeover of Giphy raised a number of competition concerns - including that it would harm competition between social media platforms, given the lack of choice in the supply of animated GIFs.