GAFA: the American giants of the internet and social networks move into sports rights

"The club football market has once again become a market of pay-TV (examples: Canal+ in France; beIN Media Group in France, Spain, and Turkey; Sky in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy) and telecommunications operators (SFR in France; Orange and Vodafone in Spain; BT in the UK), but we see that the GAFA companies are posing questions: Amazon has bought one lot of the 2017-2021 Bundesliga domestic rights (broadcasting on digital platforms) and rights of the NFL in 2017 (those of the "Thursday Night Football" games), the latter to the detriment of Twitter," said Didier Quillot, CEO of the LFP, on 16/05/2017.

The term GAFA originally refers to four American conglomerates of the internet and new technologies: Google (Alphabet group, internet), Amazon (e-commerce), Facebook (social network), and Apple (computers). By extension, the term GAFA now includes other American internet (and telecommunications) groups, such as the social networks Snapchat (Snap Inc. group) and Twitter, or the internet search engine Yahoo (now called Altaba since the finalisation of its acquisition by the…