Yahoo will no longer be available from mainland China

The migration of the last US online services from China continues. Now the web pioneer Yahoo announced that its services would no longer be available from mainland China. The company cited growing business and legal challenges in a statement, adding, "Yahoo continues to advocate the rights of its users and a free and open Internet. We thank our users for their support." It is a largely symbolic step, because the most important Yahoo offerings such as e-mail services have not been usable in China for a number of years. Microsoft closed the Chinese version of the LinkedIn career network only in mid-October. The platform referred among other things to higher regulatory requirements, a "challenging operating environment" and stricter guidelines in the country. "While we have been successful in helping Chinese users find jobs and economic opportunities, we have not had the same success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed." Linkedin went onto the market in China in 2014 with a limited special version and subjected itself to the strict restrictions imposed by the Chinese authorities on online platforms. The Google services have not been available in China for a number of years, and Facebook had not even started in the country. Online platforms in China are obliged to make data from Chinese users available to the authorities upon request and content that is prohibited in the country - such as references to the massacre and the bloody suppression of the democracy movement on Tiananmen Square in 1989 in Beijing - to remove. According to US media reports, the authorities have asked LinkedIn to enforce the rules more strictly in recent months.