Although this is not a new trend, every time a foreign site is blocked in China, the most important and puzzling question is, ‘Why?’ That’s especially true in this case with Bing, since the company followed all the norms laid out by the Chinese government to operate its service for users there.

Traditionally, Chinese authorities have taken a heavy-handed, restrictive approach towards the internet in its country, to the point it’s dubbed ‘The Great Firewall of China.’ In the last decade, it has banned major sites like Google (and its other services like Maps and Gmail), Facebook, and Twitter. In 2010, China released a white paper defending its censorship, in which it said that while the internet is “a crystallization of human wisdom,” citizens can’t attain it all.

Earlier this month, Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), an official agency to oversee online content,  kicked off a program to take down content related to pornography, violence gambling, defrauding, misinformation, parody, and hate speech. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, China has blocked nearly 773 websites and shut down 9,382 apps, under this program in the past three weeks. It’s quite possible that Bing‘s takedown is a part of this. 

While StatCounter suggests Bing only covers 2 percent of the search market in China, it’s an important incident as Bing was one of the few major valley products operating in the country, and the last major foreign search engine available there. This should also make Google think about its decision to make a censored search engine tuned for the country. Beyond the concerns about building a service that adheres to government pressures to censor content, Bing’s sad fate shows there’s no guarantee that even a China-tuned product won’t be booted offline at any time.