In mid-December, the current CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, spoke in front of Congress, to address concerns that a number of people in Congress have regarding the power Google has over the internet. While much of the hearing was devoted to possible bias in Google’s searching when it comes to politics, one of the things that were brought up were the alleged plans Google has for launching a new censored search engine in China. The Washington Post reported that Pichai “said the company has an internal effort to develop a product aimed at the Chinese market, though he declined to say what it was or whether it was likely to be a search engine.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Google has operated in China, either. In 2006, Google first entered the Chinese market and brought millions of Chinese citizens onto the internet for the first time, although these Google searches were subject to censorship by the Chinese government. However, later on in 2010, Google tried to get around the censorship and as a result, the search engine was banned.
Information about this search engine called “Dragonfly” comes from a report from The Intercept that goes into detail describing how an unnamed Chinese partner would have “unilateral access” to a user’s data and would censor results about democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. Since the leak, employees at Google have raised concerns with the transparency around Dragonfly within the company, and the possible moral quandaries they would have with helping an authoritarian government spy on its citizens.
When Sundar Pichai was asked about these plans by Congress, he stated that Google had “no plans to launch a search service in China.” Currently, this may be true, since more recent reports describe internal fighting at the company, preventing progress on the project from being made. It is unclear whether the project has been completely abandoned or has just been put on hold.
The concern and controversy about the project extend beyond the inner circle of Google employees. Amnesty International sent an open letter, signed by various human rights groups, to the CEO of Google expressing concerns about Dragonfly. An excerpt from the letter states, “New details leaked to the media strongly suggest that if Google launches such a product it would facilitate repressive state censorship, surveillance, and other violations affecting nearly a billion people in China.”
