Meta mostly fails in appeal against order from UK watchdog to sell Giphy Judges in the UK have dismissed the majority of an appeal made by Facebook parent Meta to overturn a watchdog's decision to order the social media giant to sell Giphy for antitrust reasons. Facebook acquired GIF-sharing biz Giphy in May 2020. But Blighty's Competition Markets Authority (CMA) wasn't happy with the $400 million …
The judges not making a decision and saying go back and discuss it, feels like a major cop out.
What are the 2 groups going to say? Meta are going to say, we shouldnt have to sell. CMA are going to say you have to sell.
Guess what? Back to the courts we go!
What a waste of everyone's time and money...
I've got to disagree with your conclusion there. From how I'm reading the papers the defense (appeal) by META was that the CMA hadn't followed their own rules when reviewing this.
The judges / panel has found that the CMA (mostly) followed the rules and are within their rights to demand that META divest itself from Giphy. Where the CMA didn't completely follow the rules wasn't material enough to allow Giphy to be integrated into META.
"I still find it baffling that a company that sole purpose was to host GIFs which were primarily made from content they didn't own the copyright to, could be even worth $400m."
Meanwhile, Meta is worth multiple billions from selling the private info from their users. At least they are consistent as a corporation.
Buying a company with a searchable catalog of GIFs is what does it? Not all the trading in personal information, various scandals, knowingly using algorithms that accentuate partisanship and division because doing so increases engagement/profits, and so on? Nope, you can do all that but we'll be damned if you we'll let you buy a GIF company that no one ever heard of before that purchase was announced!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
