The Indian arm of American web service provider Yahoo Thursday shut down its news operations in the country over the central government’s new Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) rules.
The new rules, which came into effect in Sept 2020, have capped FDI to 26 per cent in digital media.
The government has also asked all digital media having FDI more than 26 per cent to bring down the investment to the threshold by Oct 15, 2021 and seek the approval of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
After the shut down, a statement in the home page of Yahoo reads, “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.”
Yahoo, owned by American technology company Verizon Media, used to provide news related to general events, sports, entertainment, finance et al.
“There have been changes in the rules limiting foreign ownership of media companies that operate in the news and current affairs space, including a digital media entity that streams, uploads digital news and current affairs content in India and news aggregators,” April Boyd, head of GlobalPublic Policy, Verizon Media, said as quoted by Economic Times.
