Reports of Google China's death are greatly exaggerated

Google engineers have found that the search giant has continued with its work on the controversial search engine customised for China.

It looks that our conclusion that Google has “terminated” its China project may have been premature. After the management bowed to pressure from both inside and outside of the company to stop the customised search engine for China, codenamed “Dragonfly”, some engineers have told The Intercept that they have seen new codes being added to the products meant for this project.

Despite that the engineers on Dragonfly have been promised to be reassigned to other tasks, and many of them are, Google engineers said they noticed around 100 engineers are still under the cost centre created for the Dragonfly project. Moreover, about 500 changes were made to the code repositories in December, and over 400 changes between January and February of this year. The codes have been developed for the mobile search apps that would be launched for Android and iOS users in China.

There is the possibility that these may be residuals from the suspended project. One source told The Intercept that the code changes could possibly be attributed to employees who have continued this year to wrap up aspects of the work they were doing to develop the Chinese search platform. But it is also worth noting that the Google leadership never formally rang the dead knell of Dragonfly.

The project, first surfaced last November, has angered quite a few Google employees that they voiced their concern to the management. This was also a focal point of Sundar Pichai’s Congressional testimony in December. At that time, multiple Congress members questioned Pichai on this point, including Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Tom Marino (R-PA), David Cicilline (D-RI), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Keith Rothfus (R-PA), according to the transcript. Pichai’s answers were carefully worded, when he repeated stated “right now there are no plans for us to launch a search product in China”. When challenged by Tom Marino, the Congressman from Pennsylvania, on the company’s future plan for China, Pichai dodged the question by saying “I’m happy to consult back and be transparent should we plan something there.”

On learning that Google has not entirely killed off Dragonfly, Anna Bacciarelli of Amnesty International told The Intercept, “it’s not only failing on its human rights responsibilities but ignoring the hundreds of Google employees, more than 70 human rights organizations, and hundreds of thousands of campaign supporters around the world who have all called on the company to respect human rights and drop Dragonfly.”

While Sergei Brin, who was behind Google’s decision to pull out of China in 2010, was ready to stand up to censorship and dictatorship, which he had known too well from his childhood in the former Soviet Union, Pichai has adopted a more mercantile approach towards questionable markets since he took over the helm at Google in 2015. In a more recent case, Google (and Apple) has refused to take down the app Absher from their app stores in Saudi Arabia, with Goolge claiming that the app does not violate its policies. The app allows men to control where women travel and offers alerts if and when they leave the country.

This has clearly irritated the lawmakers. 14 House members wrote to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, “Twenty first century innovations should not perpetuate sixteenth century tyranny. Keeping this application in your stores allows your companies and your American employees to be accomplices in the oppression of Saudi Arabian women and migrant workers.”