Skype vanishes from Apple’s App Store, other app stores in China

“One of the last foreign-run tools for online communication in China appears to be in trouble with the authorities there,” Paul Mozur reports for The New York Times. “For almost a month, Skype, the internet phone call and messaging service, has been unavailable on a number of sites where apps are downloaded in China, including Apple’s app store in the country.”

“‘We have been notified by the Ministry of Public Security that a number of voice over internet protocol apps do not comply with local law. Therefore these apps have been removed from the app store in China,’ an Apple spokeswoman said Tuesday in an emailed statement responding to questions about Skype’s disappearance from the app store,” Mozur reports. “Skype, which is owned by Microsoft, still functions in China, and its fate in the country is not yet clear. But its removal from the app stores is the most recent example of a decades-long push by China’s government to control and monitor the flow of information online.”

“While China has long wielded the most sophisticated and comprehensive internet controls in the world, under President Xi Jinping it has upped the ante, squelching most major foreign social networks and messaging apps,” Mozur reports. “A key Chinese Communist Party meeting had already ended when Skype disappeared from the app stores — an indication that the cybersecurity law was the reason, and that the law, which began to be implemented in June, is likely to have a deep and long-lasting impact on how the internet works in China.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: The filament that Apple CEO Tim Cook, newly-minted recipient of the Newseum’s 2017 Free Expression Award, walks in China is increasingly tenuous.

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