This still seems like such a random acquisition for the uk to have blocked. Giphy has plenty of competition and gifs seem to he waining in popularity anyway.
What are they into, tiktoks/instagrams (I'm still annoyed that I can't know if an instagram link is going to be an image, or a video, these days—it's for photos, damnit!) with captions? That's just gifs with worse UI.
Stickers is the new thing now. The world outside of old people in America have moved their discourse to private chats such as WeChat and WhatsApp and Snapchat
> “Marketplace commentary and user sentiment towards GIFs on social media shows that they have fallen out of fashion as a content form, with younger users in particular describing GIFs as ‘for boomers’ and ‘cringe’,” the company wrote in a submission to the CMA.
actually reading the article in full, it's clear GIPHY and Meta are mentioning this with a BIASED motive to present their investment as non competitive.
If giphy was doing so amazing, how does that explain the enormous write down today? Sure you can argue Meta overpaid, and there are some bounds applied by the regulator on how they could sell it, but I don't think that accounts for the entire gap.
CMA isn't a quango - its absolutely a direct government org, established by Act of Parliament. Nothing "Non-Governmental" to see here, its run by the Department for Business and Trade.
From wikipedia:
Type Non-ministerial government department
"A non-ministerial department (NMD) is a government department in its own right, but does not have its own minister. However, it is accountable to Parliament through its sponsoring ministers."
UK ministers (politicians) can absolutely influence the CMA, there is no vote on its leaders - they are simply appointed by the Business Secretary, who can pick whomever they find most favorable to their own objectives. The Business Secretary can be replaced at any time without a vote by the Prime Minister too in a reshuffle.
The only real check on the CMA would be the UK's judicial review process, if a decision was especially egregious.
But this specifics of what is and is not a quango don't matter. The original claim implied that the decision was made by a politician for political reasons and this isn't the case.
