Google executive finally confirms the tech giant is no longer working on a censored search engine for China
- At Senate hearing, most questions focused on censorship not on foreign soil, but on conservative users in the US
For months, Google has danced around questions regarding the status of its censored search engine for China, but in a Senate hearing on Tuesday, one of its executives seemed to put the official kibosh on the project.
“Yes, we have terminated that,” Karan Bhatia, Google's vice president of Government Affairs and Public Policy, said in a line of questioning from Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, regarding Google's recent efforts to build a search engine for the Chinese market — referred to internally at the tech giant as Project Dragonfly.
The proclamation comes more than six months after Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress that it had "no plans to launch a search service in China," but wouldn't shut the door on the efforts completely. "It's a limited effort internally currently," Pichai said at the time.
More recently in June, Pichai told CNN that the company had "no plans" to launch a search engine in China. Still, a more definitive answer to the tech giant's plans in China has been called for by lawmakers, stockholders, and human rights groups alike.
Bhatia's response, amid hard-hitting questions from senators on Tuesday, appears to put to rest any outstanding questions about the project. And it comes at the right time for Google.
On Sunday, tech billionaire Peter Thiel said during a speech at the National Conservatism conference that the Silicon Valley giant had been "seemingly treasonous" for its decision to work with the Chinese military and not the US military. Thiel was referencing Google's Dragonfly censored search engine it had been building for China and the artificial intelligence contract it canceled with US Department of Defense, known as Project Maven.