Since Wednesday, Bing, the search engine from Microsoft, is no longer accessible in China. It was one of the last u.s. service to be available in the country, while Twitter, Google or Facebook cannot be accessed by chinese internet users for many years. This disappearance was final, according to the Financial Times, which cites two anonymous sources. The chinese government would have ordered at least one of the biggest telecom operators of the country, the blocking of Bing. The cause: it would have displayed "illegal content," a term that has been polished to justify its censorship complete.

"We can confirm that Bing is currently inaccessible in China, and we are now looking to take the next step," explained a spokesperson for Microsoft Thursday evening. It happens sometimes that a website is temporarily blocked in China, before returning to the line, and then get banned permanently. This is for example what happened to Google, inaccessible in the country since 2012.

This sudden blockage is surprising. Microsoft has been working for several years with the chinese authorities, offering versions of its products tailored to the requirements of the censorship of the government. The Chinese use a special version of Windows, its operating system, developed in partnership with a chinese company. The cloud service of Microsoft Azure, is installed in data centers in China, in order to be monitored by the authorities. The american group has also recently inaugurated a centre for research and development in Shanghai.

Bing is not a service that is very popular in China, occupying only 2% of the market share in the face of Baidu, the leader of the research in the country. Nevertheless, it was one of the few entrance doors to see the content in English on the Internet, when they did not offend the censorship of the government. For example, reports the New York Times, a research to the Dalai Lama to return automatically to internet sites the government accusing the spiritual leader of hatiser the hatred in China.

beyond The consequences for Microsoft, this crash is also bad news for the american industry of new technologies. China is a market that is very attractive to the giants of the sector, because of its immense size, but also very difficult to access. Besides Google, Facebook is also blocked in the country (since 2009), as well as Instagram, WhatsApp or Twitter. This does not prevent these companies from attempting to return by the small gate. Facebook has already met with the chinese authorities on several occasions, and was launched in the country a photos app under a different name, in order to test discreetly the market. More recently, Google has been highly criticized in the United States for his project, a search engine tailored to the censorship of chinese, called Dragonfly. However, recent diplomatic tensions and economic between China and the United States, with the case of Huawei in the center of the cyclone, could hinder much of these ambitions.

For the past several months, China has tightened its censorship online, taking on the media up here is less controlled. It was prohibited for nine months, the placing on the market of new video games, resulting in the loss of a third of the market value of its national champion Tencent, very present in this sector ultralucratif. TikTok, the application of videos is very popular in China and outside, is also seen to impose new rules drastic moderation.