Hello, welcome back to Emlex's weekly podcast covering regulatory developments around the world with our team of reporters.

I'm James Panicki from Emlex's Asia- Asia Pacific team. It's great to have your company.

Well, whether or not GIFs feature in your day-to-day communication, the small video loops

used to brighten up messages are big business, so much so that in May, the social media giant

Facebook acquired GIFI, that's G-I-P-H-Y, and it's a company that is a GIF database and

search engine. The deal was worth a reported $400 million. It's now a done deal, and it wasn't put

forward to regulators for review. And in a more innocent time, that wouldn't have raised too many

eyebrows. Today, though, regulators are starting

to take notice. In the course of the past few weeks, we've written about regulatory moves in

Australia, the UK and the US, all of them pointing to a level of disquiet over the deal.

And just a very quick linguistic parenthesis, I realise there are those in the US who pronounce

it GIF, not GIF with hard G, but we'll stick to GIF today. just a very quick linguistic parenthesis. I realize there are those in the US who pronounce it

GIF, not GIF with hard G. But we'll stick to GIF today for the benefit of a wider audience.

And we're joined now by Joshua Sisko, Mlex's San Francisco-based chief antitrust correspondent.

Josh, let's take a few steps back. What is Giffy and how is it used?

Giffy is essentially a search engine for GIFs,

those sort of moving photographs of memes and other jokes

that people pass around the office on Twitter, text messages,

dumpster fires, Mariah Carey,

and the like. Those are gifts. And this is clearly not part of Facebook's core business. I mean,

Facebook doesn't produce gifts itself. So why would the social media platform be interested in buying this company? Yeah, so Facebook is the communications platform.

You can think of gifts as sort of the language.

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