Google's Secret China Project 'Effectively Ended' After Internal Confrontation: Report (theintercept.com)

Less than five months after Google's plan to build a censored search engine and other tools for the Chinese market became public, the company has "effectively ended" the project, reports The Intercept. From the report: Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company's privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned. The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.

Comments

Not the end.

[Gravis Zero]

I get the feeling that there is too much "ambition" (greed) in play here to simply walk away. Instead, it seems like they put this on the back burner until people stop paying attention and then start things going again with a smaller team.

Scruples seem to be in short supply among executives and board members when it comes to getting a piece of the China pie.