Aashish Sehrawat
Credit: IndiaTV
On August 26, the American web services company Yahoo announced the closure of its news operations in India. From Thursday onwards, it will not post any new content. Yahoo Mail will not be affected by the downtime, according to the company.
“As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account, Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership,” stated the web service provider on its India homepage.
Yahoo News, Yahoo Cricket, Finance, Entertainment, and MAKERS India are among the content offerings that would be disrupted by the outage.
The site stated that they did not make this decision lightly, but that changes to regulatory regulations that limit foreign ownership of media organisations that operate and produce digital content in India had an impact on their India operations. The new FDI laws for digital media, it claimed, had an impact on its products.
Yahoo Cricket, which is about sports, includes a news component, according to the report, which is why it has been touched by the new restrictions as well.
The company, which is owned by Verizon Media, has stopped publishing material in the country as a result of the new FDI policy, which will take effect in October and restricts foreign funding of more than 26% in digital news media outlets.
It reiterated that Yahoo Mail will continue to work and that users’ email IDs will not change.
Yahoo said, “We’ve had a long association with India, and remain open to opportunities that connect us to users here.”
“In case you are a Yahoo Mail user, this change does not affect you in any way. This development does not impact our products Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Search, where we will continue to serve users in India as before, without any change,” it said.
It was a surprise at the time because it was a departure from previous policy. Until then, only Indian print media and news broadcast television companies were subject to FDI restrictions, which were set at 26% and 49%, respectively. Foreign investors and businesses launching digital media initiatives aimed at Indian consumers were not subject to any limitations.