Meta To Soon Acquire GIPHY After Being Given Green Light By The Court After Investigation

For quite some time now, we’ve been hearing about Meta acquiring GIPHY but the deal has yet to pull through, thanks to a case put up by the CMA.

Ever since the news of GIPHY becoming a part of Meta popped up, the CMA has been after the deal, asking the UK court to intervene as it had plenty of concerns on the matter.

The anti-trust regulation from the United Kingdom felt that the mega $400 million deal of Meta’s ownership of the GIPHY was not fair regarding antitrust grounds.

They’ve wanted the deal to unwind for quite some time as they felt the deal pulling through would end up providing Meta with an unfair competitive advantage in the country’s market for digital advertisements.

It does make sense where the UK anti-trust body was coming from because if you look at the bigger picture, Meta has a huge network, and taking GIPHY onto its platform would certainly not increase its value by such a significant degree.

But the CMA was not concerned about that. They were more after the fact that the GIPHY platform had a number of other ambitions that would assist in boosting Meta’s activity. And as you can probably imagine, the end result would be a further expansion of Meta’s already striking market presence.

Therefore, over the past two years, the duo has butted heads on a number of concerns, seeing matters being headed over to the country’s courts. That is why the deal has been paused for so long.

Thankfully, we’ve seen a breakthrough come out finally where the UK courts have dismissed all the claims and woes made by the CMA. This means Meta can continue with its acquisition deal as planned as CMA sulks with its rejections.

The news was recently put out by Bloomberg which mentioned that a judge threw out all the CMA’s orders about Meta selling off GIPHY. This came in the form of a ruling on Monday.

Now, this deal could be sent back to the CMA to think twice about if such deals would end up lessening competition in the digital advertising market and across other social media apps or not.

Clearly, these are harder ways of saying that the CMA has lost and Meta will soon be taking over GIPHY soon.

But the problem is that so many are only wondering what the integration would end up appearing like because as of now, Meta is already making use of plenty of tools from GIPHY across its various apps.

Maybe that will undergo further expansion on apps like Facebook or Instagram where the whole post-creation ordeal is positively impacted.

Many are talking about the move which could force Meta to rethink its ongoing GIPHY partnerships with other archrivals like Twitter, Snap Inc, and TikTok too among others.

Another interesting point worth mentioning here is how GIPHY chose to strike out new deals with both Reddit and even Twitter, despite news of Meta acquiring the platform. That is definitely a little strange because remember, such apps are threatening competitors for Meta too.

It appears that they are carrying on with independent operations until the deal is finalized.


Read next: Facebook Users Will Soon Be Allowed To Create Up To Four Additional Profiles
Previous Post Next Post