This Tuesday, July 16, Karan Bhatia - vice president of public policy Google - announced before the US Senate abandonment of the project DragonFly. This search engine aimed at China had sparked heated controversy, especially because of the risk of censorship of results and invasion of privacy of Chinese users.
The DragonFly project would have allowed the US firm, absent from the Chinese market since 2010, to reach more than one billion additional users.
A temporary abandonment?
" We stopped the DragonFly project ": this is how Google announced that it has abandoned the development of its search engine in collaboration with the Chinese government. This announcement is today the clearest issued by Google for the future of DragonFly, after its many contradictory statements last year.
However, the intentions of the Mountain View firm regarding the Chinese market remain unclear. The term " interrupted ", in particular, raises questions: is the project permanently buried, or simply paused? A spokesman for Google responded to journalists' requests for clarification with the following sentence: " We do not intend to Launch Search in China and no work is being done on such a project. "
If according to Google, the teams working on DragonFly were assigned to new projects, some employees would suspect the firm to continue to work in secret on a search engine bending to the requirements of China.
The genesis of a highly controversial project
Since the revelation of its development by Intercept magazine in August 2018, the DragonFly project has been the subject of much criticism. It was first the Google employees themselves who expressed their indignation by sending a letter to the management of the American giant, demanding the abandonment of the project. Jack Poulson, one of Google's lead researchers, also resigned at that time, in protest.
NGOs and human rights groups had followed, also making their voices heard against DragonFly. Concerned for respect for freedom of expression in China, about 60 organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation - to name but a few - have publicly expressed their disagreement. According to them, DragonFly would be a new opportunity for the Chinese government to collect personal data, including those of journalists, and reinforce the censorship already pervasive in the country.
After a motion of censure filed by some shareholders of the firm, the Trump administration also opposed the realization of the DragonFlyproject.
Indeed, last October, Mike Pence - vice president of the United States - would have asked Google to stop his project to not strengthen the censorship of the Communist Party. It seems that the American firm has finally come to its senses. The recent announcement of an antitrust investigation against Google, suspected by the US government to work in secret for the Chinese army would it be for something?
DragonFly is not the first Google project to provoke heated debate before being abandoned prematurely. Remember the Maven project, in collaboration with the Pentagon: following a wave of resignations of many employees, the firm had aborted its project of autonomous military drones, doped with AI.
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