According to a Bloomberg, Facebook once again worried about the antitrust test in its acquisition of $ 400 million Giphy report citing two sources with knowledge of the matter. If history is an indicator, Facebook can and will do whatever it wants.
Unnamed sources tell Bloomberg that Giphy paid dividends to investors, which withdrew its assets enough so that Facebook and Giphy could avoid alerting antitrust regulators when the big social media crash moved to buy gif based company in May 2020. The practice is legal, but it is a strong case for those appointed by the Biden administration to move with the promised antitrust reform.
The report arrives a few days after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged in a dismissed claim that, for years, Facebook illegally buried a number of small competitors.
Under federal law, Facebook and Giphy should have filed a notice of urgency with the FTC and the Department of Justice (DOJ) if, at the time of the acquisition last year, the minimum value of the transaction passed $ 94 million.
Giphy declined to comment in an email to Gizmodo. Facebook did not comment on Giphy’s alleged payments, but claimed the benefits of Giphy’s integration for Instagram users and separately described the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit as “deserving.”
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His purchase of Giphy implied that Facebook had little fear of antitrust regulators, under the reasonable assumption that it is indestructible after an overflow of alleged antitrust violations for years. When it announced the acquisition of Giphy in May 2020, the FTC did already investigating the company for possible antitrust violations. Last month, a federal judge he pulled out the previous iteration of the FTC lawsuit, arguing that it had not provided enough evidence to show that Facebook has an illegal monopoly on social media. The judge granted the commission 30 days to retry it with an amended complaint.
In the complaint filed last Thursday, the FTC quoted Facebook’s long-standing practice of acquiring and gaining rivals (such as the “tbh” voting app and the AR EyeGroove-enabled music video app) or leveraging its success (Instagram and WhatsApp ). The FTC wrote that Facebook simply did not have the talent to compete “equitably,” which became apparent “after several costly failures” and resorted to “buying new innovators who were succeeding where Facebook failed.”
Looking at the large cemetery, there are lies Poke, Facebook Snapchat; Camera, his Instagram; Subscribe, his Twitter; Facebook Places, your Foursquare; Barris, your Nextdoor. The list goes on.
“Acquire these competitive threats [Instagram and WhatsApp] it has allowed Facebook to maintain its dominance – to the detriment of competition and users – not by competing for the fund, but by avoiding competition, ”says the lawsuit. The FTC is calling for a deviation from Instagram and WhatsApp.
The point of buying Giphy was apparently to give Instagram users access to the Giphy library of Stories and DM. Some hypothesized that Facebook can be so small-grained as to use the service to track popular gifs and order cheats, which seems logical.