Yahoo Will Officially Leave China

 

Yahoo, an internet company known for its popular search engine, e-mail, and directory services, hasofficially left China. Services provided by Yahoo will no longer be accessible in China starting earlierthis month. Yahoo became the second leading technology company to leave the Bamboo Curtain country in the past month, after LinkedIn (Microsoft) decided to close in mid-October 2021. Yahoo said its decision was based on the increasingly stringent regulatory situation in China. "In recognition of the increasing challenges of the business and legal environment in China, Yahoo services will no longer be accessible from Mainland China starting November 1," a Yahoo spokesperson said.

Yahoo's departure from China coincided with the enactment of China's Personal Information Protection Act. The privacy law is allegedly going to curb the collection of Chinese user data by technology companies, such as Yahoo, for example. However, Yahoo itself would not directly mention whether the implementation of the privacy law was a factor behind the closure of its service.

Yahoo services discontinued in China

After this announcement of the departure, Chinese internet users also received notifications regarding the termination of a number of services provided or hosted by Yahoo. For example, from the AOL.com web browser, and a number of media sites such as Tech Crunch and Engadget.

Even the weather service Yahoo Weather has been showing the notification since October

Anti-censorship site Applecensorship.com also reported that the Yahoo Finance application (financial news and data) and Yahoo Mail had disappeared from the Chinese App Store app store since October 14. This application is called not too widely used in the Bamboo Curtain country. Yahoo itself entered the Chinese market in 1999, launching an e-mail service, search engine, and language translation service for articles from the United States.

Since the cooperation agreement in 2005, most of Yahoo's operations have been run by Jack Ma's tech giant Alibaba Group Holding. However, in recent times, Alibaba is also gradually discontinuing Yahoo's services.

In 2021, or after 22 years of being in China, Yahoo will finally decide to leave. Tight regulations in China have had an impact on a number of players in the technology industry. In addition to Yahoo and LinkedIn which incidentally came from the US, local players were also affected. For example, Tencent decided to stop playing Fortnite in China starting November 15.

The Chinese government has also recently implemented a series of restrictions on playing for children and delayed the approval process for various new games.

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