LONDON: Facebook has made a case for not selling Giphy in a strongly worded letter to a British regulator and questioned the watchdog’s recent call to divest the GIF website over competition concerns.
Facebook argued that “the inability of the CMA (the UK Competition and Markets Authority) to issue any order against Giphy raises serious questions as to the enforceability of any divestment order and whether any such order could be effective,” in its letter that CMA published online on Wednesday.
The CMA last month hinted that Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, might need to sell Giphy based on its preliminary findings that the deal would hurt the display advertising market and other social media networks.
Facebook bought Giphy, a website for making and sharing animated images, or GIFs, last year to integrate it with its photo-sharing app, Instagram. The deal, pegged at $400 million by news website Axios, was being probed by the CMA since January.
Facebook in its letter said the CMA’s provisional findings had “fundamental errors,” and the British regulator had failed to provide alternative remedies that would have been “far less intrusive and equally effective” for it to clear the deal.
California-based Facebook declined to comment further and the CMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Facebook questions British watchdog’s authority to order Giphy sale
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Facebook questions British watchdog’s authority to order Giphy sale
- Facebook has made a case for not selling Giphy and questioned the watchdog’s recent call to divest the GIF website over competition concern
Saudi Arabia ‘ideal partner’ in shaping next wave of intelligent age, communication minister tells WEF
- Abdullah Al-Swaha said aim was to “help the world achieve the next $100 trillion by energizing the intelligence age”
DAVOS: Saudi Arabia has accelerated efforts in “energizing the intelligent age,” making the Kingdom the world’s ideal partner in shaping the next wave of the technological age, said the minister of communication and information technology.
Speaking during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Abdullah Al-Swaha said the aim was to “help the world achieve the next $100 trillion by energizing the intelligence age.”
He said the Kingdom was expanding global partnerships for the benefit of humanity and highlighted both local and international achievements.
“We believe the more prosperous the Kingdom, the Middle East, is, the more prosperous the world is. And it is not a surprise that we fuel 50 percent of the digital economy in the kingdom or the region,” he told the audience. He added the Kingdom fueled three times the tech force of its neighbors and, as a result, 50 percent of venture capital funding.
Al-Swaha said Saudi Arabia was focused both on artificial intelligence acceleration and adoption. At home, he said, the Kingdom was doubling the use of agentic AI in the public and private sector to increase worker productivity tenfold. He also cited the world’s first fully robotic heart transplant, which was conducted in Saudi Arabia.
“If we double down on talent, technology, and build trust with partners, we can achieve success,” he said. “And we are following the same blueprint for the intelligence age.”
He said the Kingdom aimed to be a “testbed” for innovators and investors. Rapid technological adoption and investment have boosted Saudi Arabia’s non-oil economy, with non-oil activities accounting for 56 percent of GDP and surpassing $1.2 trillion in 2025, ahead of the Vision 2030 target.
In terms of adoption, Al-Swaha said the Kingdom had introduced the Arabic-language AI model, Allam, to be adopted across Adobe product series. It has also partnered with Qualcomm to bring the first hybrid AI laptop and endpoints to the world.
“These are true testimonies that the kingdom is not going local or regional; we are going global,” he said.
