Hello and welcome to another Emlex podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, a Sydney-based senior reporter with Emlex,

and it's great to have your company. In today's edition of Emlex's

podcast, we look at the UK Competition and Markets Authority's recent decision on Mehta's

ownership of video database, GIFI. It was the second time the UK regulator had blocked the

acquisition, which took place in 2020, and it's a decision with global consequences, as you'll hear

in our discussion, with potential implications in Australia, where I've reported on the deal

and subsequent fallout for the last two years. At the time of the acquisition, Meta was of course

known as Facebook, so you'll hear us discuss this as the Facebook Giffy deal in places.

Here to discuss it with me is Emlex Senior Correspondent Victoria Ibetoye,

who joins me now from London and has covered every twist and turn of this regulatory spat

between the CMA and meta.

So Victoria, why don't you tell us a little bit about this latest decision from the CMA?

Yes, so late last month, the CMA blocked Facebook's acquisition of Giffy.

So the deal had actually been sent back to the CMA in July after the courts in the UK.

Essentially found that the first time round round the CMA's approach had been

way too favourable to third parties and it's sort of taken their concerns about confidentiality,

placed that ahead of the Facebook and Giffy's ability to defend themselves from its findings.

So, so yeah, so this sort of resulted in a complete redo of the investigation,

the in-depth probe bit of it. And yeah, and the second time around the CMA essentially just

reinforced its original position. It found that the deal would limit choice for social media

users by reducing access to GIFs and essentially reduce

innovation in display advertising in the UK. So the second part of that was that essentially the

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