
oh, btw
the ticker on the front page of the register is MOST annoying and MOST unwelcome.
Yahoo! has confirmed it is quitting China due to the "increasingly challenging" business and legal environment just as the country's new Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) comes into effect. Starting November 1, 2021, global companies doing business in the country must comply with PIPL, which regulates the storage of …
I think there are a few indicators for imminent failure of a company:
- Abuses customers in favor of profit
- Focuses more on government politics than public opinion
- Apathy towards abuses of their services (or encourages it for profit)
- Shifts attention from architecting amazing products to architecting amazing offices
By these metrics, Google is following the path of imminent collapse that Yahoo blazed 20 years ago, while Yahoo could make a comeback for no better reason than sucking less than Google.
And make that a double. El Reg took up my suggestion of slanting the exclamation points too. It's a jab at Yahoo!'s branding.
I still have an account, which I opened in 2003. I don't really use it anymore, it's okay for the occasional test message.
How many years before it's closing everywhere not just in China. From what I know, a lot of people in the US still use it for news, but maybe that's an old stat.
If they were leaving out of protest over an increasingly authoritarian government, I would be quite happy and hope other western companies would follow Yahoo's lead. However, let's face it, none of them ever will. Yahoo's only leaving because they won't be able to harvest and sell all that sweet personal data about Chinese citizens, which means they can't turn a profit in the country, so they're pulling up stakes.
It's been clear for many years what the long term Chinese plan is. It's reaching fruition now. Attract foreign companies with seemingly attractive terms, legally take their IP etc., then make it very difficult for them to remain while developing local alternatives.
The difference between the CCP and Facebook is that that CCP was completely up front about the terms of trade when they opened up to investment from the West.
In return for access to cheap labour and a growing consumer market all they had to do was agree to the terms on the understanding the terms might change without notice, and they fell over themselves to sign up.
Facebook has never really been that honest.
The alternative is that other countries develop the balls to insist on privacy of personal data (looking at the EU's persistent efforts to fudge the issue with privacy fig-leaves etc. and HMG running in totally the opposite direction). At that point the big tech firms would have to start looking at different business models.
" In the long run, we will find out just how far commercial entities are willing to go in order to maximise shareholder value, but we might not like the answer.”
I like Disney, how it was, the idea but they have no morales. Pandered to the CCP just to get the Chinese market for the new Mulan film, did a press event in the city the genocide is happening in and just generally only cared about how much money they could make. Which spectacularly back fired. They still try to blame it on piracy in China but it had fuck all to do with that. Was to do with a fucked movie, that completely changed the story and got lots of Chinese references wrong as we see from the Chinese reviews.