Yahoo 2009 Annual Report Download - page 30

• geopolitical events, including acts of war and terrorism;
• import or export regulations;
• compliance with U.S. laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and local laws prohibiting corrupt
payments to government officials;
• seasonal volatility in business activity and local economic conditions;
• laws and business practices that favor local competitors or prohibit foreign ownership of certain businesses;
• different and more stringent user protection, data protection, privacy and other laws; and
• risks related to other government regulation or required compliance with local laws.
Violations of the complex foreign and U.S. laws and regulations that apply to our international operations could
result in fines, criminal actions or sanctions against us, our officers or our employees, prohibitions on the conduct
of our business and damage to our reputation. Although we have implemented policies and procedures designed
to promote compliance with these laws, there can be no assurance that our employees, contractors or agents will
not violate our policies. These risks inherent in our international operations and expansion increase our costs of
doing business internationally and could result in harm to our business, operating results, and financial condition.
New technologies could block display advertisements or search marketing listings, which would harm our
operating results.
Technologies have been developed and are likely to continue to be developed that can block the display of our
advertisements or our search marketing listings. Most of our revenues are derived from fees paid to us by
advertisers in connection with the display of advertisements or clicks on search marketing listings on Web pages.
As a result, advertisement-blocking technology could reduce the number and relevancy of advertisements and
search results that we are able to deliver and, in turn, our advertising revenues and operating results.
Proprietary document formats may limit the effectiveness of our search technology by preventing our
technology from accessing the content of documents in such formats, which could limit the effectiveness of
our products and services.
A large amount of information on the Internet is provided in proprietary document formats such as Microsoft
Word. These proprietary document formats may limit the effectiveness of our search technology by preventing
our technology from accessing the content of such documents. The providers of the software applications used to
create these documents could engineer the document format to prevent or interfere with our ability to access the
document contents with our search technology. This would mean that the document contents would not be
included in our search results even if the contents were directly relevant to a search. The software providers may
also seek to require us to pay them royalties in exchange for giving us the ability to search documents in their
format. If a software provider also competes with us, it may give its search technologies, or the technologies of
our competitors, a preferential ability to search documents in its proprietary format. Any of these results could
harm our brand and our operating results.
Interruptions, delays, or failures in the provision of our services could harm our operating results.
Delays or disruptions to our service could result from a variety of causes, including the following:
• Our operations are susceptible to outages and interruptions due to fire, flood, earthquake, power loss,
telecommunications failures, cyber attacks, terrorist attacks, and similar events.
• The systems through which we provide our products and services are highly technical, complex, and
interdependent. Design errors might exist in these systems, or might be introduced as we roll-out
improvements and upgrades, which might cause service malfunctions or require services to be taken offline
while corrective responses are developed.
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