Great reporting by Gallagher. He should win a Pulitzer for his reporting on Dragonfly.
The fact that Pichai refused to say they wouldn't re-enter China shows this is probably just a pause until things die down.
The fact that Pichai refused to say they wouldn't re-enter China shows this is probably just a pause until things die down.
Exactly. It's the same tactic employed with various authoritarian measures such as the DMCA, TPP, SOPA, etc. Unpalatable to the public is a temporary condition. They overplayed their hand this time, but corporations are slaves to the inexorable demands of "shareholder value", and those who stand to profit will ratchet up the pressure, notch by notch. This will be back in a year, and then a year hence, and by the Nth exposure the public will have been sufficiently desensitized to it.
The unfortunate thing is that the headline of this article should probably be "Google's Secret China Project Now Even More Secret."
Google hasn't pretended to give in to pressure from employees. Project Dragonfly is still being worked on:
> In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying “global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in countries such as the United States and Malaysia
...and Google has made no promises that they won't launch it in the future:
> Pichai stated that “right now” there were no plans to launch the search engine, though refused to rule it out in the future. Google had originally aimed to launch Dragonfly between January and April 2019. Leaks about the plan and the extraordinary backlash that ensued both internally and externally appear to have forced company executives to shelve it at least in the short term...
I think the title overstates the situation. This doesn't seem so much like an end to the project than an internal political squabble. It seems like 265.com was purchased to do exactly what the Google Privacy Team has forbidden. I don't know Google's internal politics, but I'd be surprised if its privacy team has enough power to hobble one of the CEO's priorities enough to actually kill it.
from TFA it was purchased in 2008. the privacy team wasn’t really a powerful thing until 2011, as a result of the ftc consent decree.
The kiss of death was last week, Republicans saying "they'll work with China but they won't work with the military!" The ads write themselves.
The Republicans are much scarier than a loud minority of slacktivist employees.
It's a true testament to the power of quality investigative journalism.
> His reveal is what brought it to
> the attention of other Google
> employees
This is like giving credit to Glenn Greenwald instead of Edward Snowden, or Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning. The real people who take the risks end up in the back, while the reporters end up with all the prestige on the stage.
And it's not like the story has concluded anyway. Google's management still seems inclined to launching in China, they just want the heat to go away right now.
Also, 'going on the record' isn't always an option. In the case of someone like Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden, it would mean life in prison -- or worse if they were in a non-Western democracy.
It's a pragmatic response, not Machiavellian.
Times change. Situations evolve. It'd be imprudent for G to say they are never going into China.
Xi could change his mind, he could retire, or maybe there's a gaping loophole of some kind in the firewall.
Or maybe China literally opens up the firewall and does some kind of different filtering of their own.
It'd be simply unwise to draw any long term conclusions from it all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
http://fortune.com/2017/10/08/eli-attia-lawsuit-google-racke...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...