Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
15 months ago, Facebook said it was buying the popular GIF search engine Giphy for about $400 million. Now the acquisition may be a bust, thanks to an antitrust probe by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.
In a preliminary findings report published Thursday, the CMA said the deal should be unwound because it will “negatively impact competition between social media platforms.”
The CMA’s reasoning for wanting to block the Giphy deal is as follows:
“Millions of posts every day on social media sites now include a GIF. Any reduction in the choice or quality of these GIFs could significantly affect how people use these sites and whether or not they switch to a different platform, such as Facebook. As most major social media sites that…
