With a population of 1.4 billion people, every tech company is desperate to have its services operating in China. Google was even willing to offer a censored search engine to satiate the communist government. But Project Dragonfly is now officially dead.
As BuzzFeed reports, confirmation of that came via Google's vice president of public policy, Karan Bhatia. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Bhatia was asked by Republican Senator Josh Hawley about Google's dealing in China. He responded to a series of questions by stating, "We have terminated Project Dragonfly ... We have no plans to launch Search in China and there is no work being undertaken on such a project."
This is the first time Google has referred to Project Dargonfly as being "terminated," although the company pointed out this isn't new information. Google stated back in March that there are no plans to launch a search service in China and nobody working on it. So while not new, it's still a very definite "not happening" confirmation.
Project Dragonfly was controversial from the start. We first heard about it in August last year when reports of a small team working at Google were focused on a search service for China. It would comply with the Chinese government's censorship rules so as to avoid being blocked, and there was also talk of a censored news app. By August, Google employees were protesting the project, then in September a Google scientist resigned over it.
In October, Vice President Mike Pence called on Google to axe the search project, and in December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled by lawmakers in Congress. Clearly, nobody except Google's management wanted this project to go forward, and ultimately Google has either bowed to the pressure or ended work on Dragonfly because it turned out not to be feasible after all. We don't know which, but it could be a mix of both.
