As far as I can tell, the watchdog and CMA started doing their job immediately when the news of the acquisition broke. Then three years of back and forth and legal appeals followed, and now Facebook has finally lost, as was expected three years ago.

The original order for the sale came in 2021, after an extended investigation from that same year, following an initial investigation started June 2020, about a month after the sale became public knowledge.

Giphy and Facebook didn't give the CMA an opportunity to block the sale before it happened, so of course antitrust action had to occur after the fact. That's not regulatory overreach, that's lack of a time machine.

Im curious why they aren’t touching Tenor and Google. Isn’t that constellation basically the same?

I wonder about that too.

My guess is that when the Tenor sale happened back in 2018 there were still enough of small companies that competed, Giphy being one of the last major ones to get taken over.

I don't know if antitrust watchdogs can still start a successful case five years later, but I would be very happy if they could undo that sale too. These tech companies are big enough already, they don't need more power.

Overreach is when antitrust laws are used to break up trusts?

When they are breaking up potential future "trusts" for a business that doesn't exist, sure

To quote cory doctorow - the best time to break up monopolies is 40 years ago. The second best time is now.

Once monopolies form they’re exceedingly hard to break up. Proactive action is the only way we’ll prevent them in the long term

One acquisition hardly constitutes a monopoly...

Presumably it's more to do with 50% of the ad market being meta, and 50% being google. Basically, the ad monopolies should be broken up -- so any acquisition whatsoever over any ad-supported platform is anti-trust.