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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.
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.
No way is Google ending this. Spin it off into its own company, maybe not even part of Alphabet, but no way does Google just walk away from China.
Like Facebook's Building 8.
China has a ton of money and desire for a censored search engine; Google has a knowledge of search engine creation, and a desire for money. Google will find a way.
when ethics was forced upon them.
what part of "don't be evil" did the C-suite forget about?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...and replaced by an identical project under a different name with a different set of employees.
The CEO should be fired for supporting oppression.
That is all.
What is your reasoning behind this?
A communist (who believes in a highly regulated economy, where the interests of the community exceeds the interests of the individual) isn't an American Patriot, or agrees on Censoring information. Now me personally I don't see communism as an effective economic model, because we have China lagging behind the US, while in terms of resources and demographics it has the ability to exceed the US quite easily, I expect the communist economic model is holding the country back.
Next, what evidence that they are not censoring conservative American News? Conservative American News is saying it under attack all the time by censors, however it would seem to me that the censors would want to stop them from saying that as well too?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Too bad Google has the man in charge that they do. He misrepresented everything to Congress and at the same time had building a Big Brother search engine for China as one of his main goals. Get rid of this guy and bring in someone with a sense of ethics.
Though a series of 'initiatives' and 'empowerment sessions' and some 'on going improvements' those who had enough clout to actually stop a project important to upper management will find there 'performance' is now very poor @ review time until they leave or are forced to leave , the project Dragonfly will become project Panda and get built in about 3 years, sans the ugly publicity, everyone working on the project will have NDA's properly signed so that if they so much as speak of it , even at internal events they will be fired on the spot.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Why is Google super evil for considering doing this? Yes a censored internet sucks, but a smarter search engine would allow the people to China to access at least a little bit more information. In addition taking money out of China's economy also seems like a good thing. The alternative would be: they do nothing, and things stay exactly the same as it is now.
China certainly isn't going to change their mind if Google search didn't come there, so nothing would change. A 0.1% chance of doing good while making money seems better than 0% good and no extra money.
[...] enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.
Communism entails a minimal or absent state, because it would supposedly become redundant once all class struggle has disappeared. China instead has a massive and suppressive authoritarian state, mixing capitalist and nationalistic ideas into socialist ones. They're in no way progressing towards communism, but they are hovering close to national socialism.
I wonder if they will now do what IBM did during WWII when they helped germany exterminate Jews. They established a company in another country in order to hide their involvement. It will always be about money.
They publicly stopped it, will rename it and swear to secrecy the next group of folks who will be working on it.
No way they will give up that market so easily.
A new project under a team that knows to keep secrets.
Go full Communist in China under a new team.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I really hope that Google employees pay attention and complete the killing of this project regardless of whatever it morphs into. They're basically saving the company from itself.
First off, I completely agree with the human-rights angle here. China isn't the worst player on the planet. Not by a long shot. However, they are far from being the best. In the long run, it's better for Google to stay away from supporting Chinese internet. History would NOT judge them kindly for taking part in something that's widely recognized as a pretty oppressive system. Their leadership is seriously blinded by short term profit if they don't see this.
However, I seriously question the possibility of ANY profit from this project, period. Who in their right mind thinks that China would turn internet search over to a non-Chinese company? really? reeeealllllly? Google executives appear to have forgotten that China is only half capitalist. The other half is iron-fisted state-directed economics. Okay, the Chinese government MIGHT be willing to cede some extreme minority of the search market to Google, but only in exchange for complete control, the source code, and every other piece of tech that Google has ever developed. In exchange for about 1% of their search market, I'm sure. What a colossally dumb idea. This is what the Google executives were making a priority? Really?
It's just one more data point showing that top executives are mostly regular or slightly-above-average schmoes who lucked into the position. They aren't geniuses and they don't have any kind of extraordinary ability. They are successful business types who were in the right place at the right time. Nothing more.
A communist (who believes in a highly regulated economy, where the interests of the community exceeds the interests of the individual)
Communism is a brutal dictatorship where the state takes everything and leaves you nothing. Not sure what that has to do with your parenthetical.
I expect the communist economic model is holding the country back.
Ya think?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
China is communist. Your idea of "communism" is imaginary. "Real" means "as it exists in the world". Real communism is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship (which can coexist quite well with corrupt capitalism, as it turns out).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I partly disagree. There are more labels to the various socialist politics than just communism, just like how e.g. libertarianism and fascism are both very different implementations of capitalism. Communism as originally described was never implemented, except for in name. It's a bit like how North Korea or GDR calling themselves democratic doesn't make them especially democratic, and they shouldn't be held as examples of democracies.
I can totally see your point though. Communism can be placed at opposite ends on the authoritarian spectrum, depending on whether you look at the literary description of a stateless utopia or all the socialist totalitarian states that claimed to be communist.
To the point of it all, I just want things to be labeled unambiguously. Call China, say, totalitarian.
The Damore incident showed Pichai was incompetent as well as arrogant. A dangerous mix.
They will start it up again once the complainers are canned.
China is really communist, is the thing, as was Stalin's regime. That's what communism really looks like in the real world. Really.
Communism killed 160 million people. That's what communism really is. We don't need to hear about "oh, but it could be done better". So, what only 30 million killed next iteration? "Communism" is as forever tainted as little mustaches that fit under a gas mask.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Again, you're equating what was promised with what people got. History is strongly suggesting that communism as originally defined cannot be implemented successfully, but it doesn't magically change the words that were printed when defining it.