nearly the same amount of stock from SoftBank. In September 2018, Altaba sold all of its remaining shares in Yahoo! Japan for roughly $4.3 billion. Yahoo! Japan acquired trademark rights to the "Yahoo!" brand in Japan from Verizon in 2021. In March 2021 Line Corporation merged with Yahoo! Japan, which has been operated by Z Holdings, a SoftBank Group subsidiary. Under the new structure, Naver Corporation (Line's former parent company) and SoftBank Corp. (the wireless carrier unit of SoftBank Group) each hold 50 percent stakes in a new company named A Holdings Corp., which holds a majority stake in Z Holdings, which will operate Line and Yahoo! Japan. Upon integrating the two businesses and creating further platforms, the merged company aims to compete with the U.S. tech giants Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple and the Chinese tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, as well as the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. The merger also gives Z Holdings three additional Asian markets where Line is popular: Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. Yahoo Japan's services are not available in the European Economic Area and the UK since 6 April 2022, due to "excessive regulatory burden". Industry affiliations Yahoo! Japan was a founding member of Rakuten, a Japanese e-business association led by CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, in February 2010; this occurred after Rakuten withdrew from the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) in June 2011 and made moves to become the Japan Association of New Economy as a rival to Keidanren. Yahoo! Japan withdrew from the e-business association in March 2012 and it joined Keidanren in July 2012. Design Yahoo! Japan continues to use a site design from prior to 2007 and the international Yahoo logo used before 2013, colored red. Search engine One of its primary businesses, originally the Yahoo! Japan search engine was a directorytype search engine, similar to Yahoo! in the United States. A crawlertype search engine was used as well, and as the popularity of the crawlertype search engine gradually increased, after October 3, 2005, Yahoo! Japan began utilizing only the crawlertype engine. On June 29, 2017, Yahoo! Japan announced that the directory-based search engine "Yahoo! Category", which had been in operation since its establishment, would be abolished on March 29, 2018. As a crawlertype search engine, Yahoo! Japan initially used technology from the Japanese company Goo, which used Google's technology. The company later switched to using Yahoo Search Technology (YST), developed by Yahoo!