“Chinese photo agency websites go dark over licence violations”, 11 December 2019

… The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said… that Visual China Group (VCG) and ImagineChina – also known as IC Photo – did not have the proper information services licences and had not undergone a security assessment before cooperating with overseas entities, “seriously disrupting orderly network communication”.

“[The companies] illegally engaged in internet news and information services and illegally cooperated with overseas enterprises in services involving internet news and information,” the regulator said.

In near-identical statements on their official Weibo accounts, the companies said their websites would be suspended as they carried out “self-inspection” and “rectification”.

The CAC said the companies suspended their websites themselves.

In a statement from the VCG board of directors published on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange website… the company said it did not yet know the timeline for the re-opening of its website as it "earnestly and actively carries out the content self-inspection"…

Internet regulations have tightened in recent years, with online news media an occasional target.

In 2018, four popular Chinese news apps were temporarily removed from the Android store in China after regulators ordered tighten control over the spread of information. Also that year Phoenix New Media’s news portal Ifeng.com was suspended for violating news-sharing rules.

Earlier this year, VCG temporarily suspended website operations amid allegations it had been selling images of the national flag and related symbols, and falsely claiming copyright over the first images of a black hole, which were captured by the Event Horizon Telescope.

[Also referred to Agence France-Presse, Getty Images, Corbis Images, ByteDance, TikTok, Douyin and Jinri Toutiao]