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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

For all the outrage directed at Big Tech over the past decade, regulators have shied away from the nuclear option of actually breaking up a major platform. Until this week, that is [politico.eu]:

By ordering Facebook to part with Giphy [techcrunch.com], a GIF creation platform it acquired in 2020, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority broke a global taboo [politico.eu] and ushered in a brave new world of tech enforcement.

The move has taken center stage at a gathering of competition authorities from G7 countries, and is likely to cheer prominent proponents of breaking up Big Tech, like U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and U.S. antitrust chief Lina Khan — while giving pause to skeptics like the EU's digital czar, Margrethe Vestager [politico.eu].

[...] In Washington, Khan's appointment as head of the Federal Trade Commission signaled bolder moves against Silicon Valley giants. In the EU, officials are rolling out new rules to limit giants' expansion. And in China, authorities are cracking down on the tech sector, fining dozens of companies [wsj.com] that didn’t seek approval for past deals.

For Facebook in particular, antitrust is only part of the problem [acm.org].

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