Dec 1, 2021
Facebook owner Meta ordered by UK regulator to sell Giphy
The UK's competition regulator has forced Meta, Facebook's parent company, to sell online image platform Giphy, the first time it has unwound a completed Big Tech deal. Meta will be tasked with finding a buyer for Giphy that satisfies the CMA. The watchdog will set a deadline for the sale in the coming months in a legal order, and will only accept a buyer that promises to develop Giphy as an independent and effective rival to Meta. Meta controls almost half of the market, according to the regulator. In its own submissions, Meta rejected outright the idea that Giphy could ever have competed with it in advertising, particularly given the image sharing platform's financial struggles and lack of concrete plans to enter the UK market. Meta accounts for 73 per cent of user time spent on social media in the UK. The CMA argued that Meta could also have demanded more data from rivals such as TikTok in return for gifs.
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