After LinkedIn, it’s up to Yahoo !. The flight of American companies from China marks a new big blow, which further underlines – if needed – the increasingly clear divide between Washington and Beijing.
The Sunnyvale-based company has announced its decision to withdraw from the Country of the Dragon, speaking, as LinkedIn did a couple of weeks ago, of an “increasingly challenging commercial and legal environment”.
Yahoo! in fact, they have already been blocked on the Chinese market as of yesterday (November 1) and the company has made it known that “it remains committed to the rights of our users and to a free and open Internet”.
A symbolic farewell
Yahoo! had already begun a process of downsizing its operations in China, so much so that in 2015 it closed its Beijing office. And somehow today’s announcement is more symbolic than anything else, given that several services of the Californian giant (from email to news) were already blocked in the country since 2013 due to the “Great Firewall”, the same digital wall that prevents to other Western services (including Google and Facebook) to be able to operate in China, if not through the adoption of VPNs.
For the past few hours, therefore, Chinese Internet users who surf the websites managed by Yahoo! such as AOL.com, or news sites such as TechCrunch and Engadget, have received notice that Yahoo! they are no longer accessible from mainland China. And Chinese users of apps like Yahoo Weather also received information – starting in October – that the apps would be discontinued by Monday, November 1.