> 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.

> You’ll be hard pressed to find many people under 25 using them at all.

What do they use instead?

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.

It seems like we've come full circle then.

Maybe we can expect text emoticons (the ones with a hyphen for a nose) making a comeback soon.

They never went away, they just started being used ironically, but yeah, I do think we've already entered a post-ironic phase of text emotes

:-)

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.

> Frankly it seems laughable that Facebook paid $660m for Gify in the first place.

It's another vector for collecting user analytics.

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.

Maybe someone should have told Meta that when they bought Giphy!

I’m pretty sure the general tone here at the time could be summarized as “what they fuck are they thinking.”

Can confirm, reacting with gifs is 100% a boomer thing. And when I say boomer I mean anyone born before 1995.

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.

I'm inclined to agree. This reminds me of the anti-piracy legislation.

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).

Gifs in the vein of gify seem like a fad that has already crested, and I'm of the opinion that regulating internet fads is an overreach.

I laughed so hard when I read this. This is legitimately funnier than most things that are trying to be funny like sketches/standup.

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?

> considered table stakes for modern chat clients

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

> Nothing stops you from starting a new service for any sort of content library.

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

> All the value is in the search and ui

I'm pretty sure that value is approximately $0.

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