UK watchdog?s action against Facebook over Giphy prove it has teeth | Larry Elliott

Big tech has two faces. One face presents a new form of company: inclusive, socially liberal, very much with the zeitgeist, supporting the Democrats rather than the Republicans, and different from anything that has gone before.

Strip away the makeup and a different face appears: the face of a monopoly seeking to protect itself from rivals. Over the years, the giants of Silicon Valley have used their financial clout to buy up smaller companies that might pose a threat to their market power.

Facebook's acquisition of the online image platform Giphy was simply the latest example of big tech gobbling up the competition, because in their time Amazon, Google and Apple have all adopted the same tactic. This is not a new form of capitalism: it is the old form of capitalism tarted up.

To its credit, the UK's competition watchdog has now seen enough of this sort of anti-competitive behaviour and insisted that Facebook sell Giphy in its entirety - the first time it has demanded a deal involving one of the big tech companies should be unwound.

The ruling by the Competition and Markets Authority said the acquisition would increase Facebook's already "significant market power" in two ways - by driving traffic to Facebook-owned sites and by forcing rivals such as Twitter and Snapchat to provide more user data to access Giphy gifs.

Britain's regulators are sometimes accused - often with justification - of being captured by the companies they are supposed to be keeping in check. That criticism cannot be levelled at the CMA, which has proved it is a watchdog with real teeth.

No question, the CMA's decision to take on Facebook over Giphy represents an escalation of the battle between the regulators and big tech. At stake is more than simply a matter of ensuring competition between social media platforms and that innovation is encouraged rather than stifled - important though those issues are.