Sayonara Yahoo Japan auctions

[Seiko7A38]

This morning I received and checked my daily Buyee saved search notifications. Nothing new of interest had been listed.
I tried to run a search on something else, directly on Yahoo Japan this afternoon and was met with this message:

https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp/search/search/sayonara/

YahooJapan-NLA-6-04-2022.png (25.27 KiB) Viewed 5716 times

Not sure what prompted their decision. I hadn't seen any rumours or warning this was coming.
For the time being, searching manually using Buyee still works, but the images (hosted on YJ) are very slow to load.

[Seiko7A38]

Out of curiosity, I tried placing another bid on a 7A38 listed on Yahoo Japan, which I'd bid on earlier this week, using Buyee. It was only a small increment (1000 Yen) on the current high bid and I don't expect to win the auction, which still has 3 days to run. Surprisingly, Buyee accepted my bid and I received email confirmation.

Here it is using the Buyee link: https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/w1045849760
But the normal YJ item link: https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/au ... 1045849760 returns that same message.

[Seiko7A38]

Not sure what prompted their decision. I hadn't seen any rumours or warning this was coming.

A little retrospective googling reveals that Yahoo Japan announced the move at the beginning of February.
Here's a couple of links:

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14538476
https://www.insidetelecom.com/yahoo-jap ... dit-cards/

Evidently it makes more economic sense to block Europe and UK than comply with the latest EU GDPR regulations.

[Seiko7A38]

Once again, my regular Buyee saved search notifications arrived in my email inbox overnight.
As did the anticipated outbid notice on that NOS gold-tone 7A38-7289. I really don't need another, nice as it may be.

7A38-7289-Gold-YahooJapan-April2022-Buyee-Outbid-Notification.png (121.5 KiB) Viewed 5701 times

So Buyee, despite being the proxy recommended by Yahoo Japan, appears to remain unaffected. In fact, that first article I linked included the sentence: Other Yahoo-related websites offered in local languages will not be targeted.

No longer being able to run searches on Yahoo Japan auctions is inconvenient, but it's easy enough to workaround, either by getting a VPN connection, or simply by adding to and enhancing my few existing saved searches on Buyee.