Google's Secret China Project 'Effectively Ended' After Internal Confrontation: Report (theintercept.com) 82
Less than five months after Google's plan to build a censored search engine and other tools for the Chinese market became public, the company has "effectively ended" the project, reports The Intercept. From the report: Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company's privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned. The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.
The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.
The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.
Ended? (Score:5, Insightful)
No way is Google ending this. Spin it off into its own company, maybe not even part of Alphabet, but no way does Google just walk away from China.
Re: Ended? (Score:1)
I agree. Google loves money. Theyd sell their country out to make a buck. Hypocritical.
Re:Ended? (Score:5, Insightful)
The got caught doing an unpopular (perhaps unethical) project, that project name is now tainted. So Google has only one recourse. Changed the name of the project, and bring in better marketing people to spin the new product more positively.
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Regardless of what happens, Americans should remain vigilant against the worst-case scenario here: the US government repeals Network Neutrality, and passes laws requiring ISPs to block certain web sites under the guise of protecting us from ter'rists, child pornographers, and fake news. So Google restarts the project, the feds tell their constituents that this to project them, and then it all happens over again but without the push back.
Sorry if that sounds preposterous -- hopefully it will not happen --
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the US government repeals Network Neutrality, and passes laws requiring ISPs to block certain web sites
No need to repeal NN, it's already baked into the rules. ISPs cannot block or slow lawful content and lawful traffic. Lawful is actually a higher bar than "legal," and there's nothing in NN that says the US cannot define specifically what is lawful content and lawful traffic.
Just for your edification, here is the link to the latest proposals from the MPAA [torrentfreak.com], in which they describe, among other thinks, "Illegal internet protocol television services," (that would be unlawful traffic), and "Additionally, illega
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The US government is already doing that via things like Operation Choke Point [wikipedia.org] and what New York governor Cuomo [thehill.com] is doing to the NRA.
Patreon has joined Google, various credit card network, and various hosting services in denying service to selected individuals and businesses in the name of political correctness.
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Actually most likely they will set the effort aside for some time. Management that still invested in it will recall who the loyalists were. Those folks will be promoted for being "team players".
Having solidified their support among middle management upper management will try again in a year or two. They will tell everyone how "this time its different" while those newly minted middle manager dust off the old projects plans, check the old code back into new repos and pass everything through sed replacing t
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Actually most likely they will set the effort aside for some time. Management that still invested in it will recall who the loyalists were. Those folks will be promoted for being "team players".
Highly unlikely. Many of the signatories of the Dragonfly opposition memos, internal and public, were senior, highly-respected and highly-influential staff. People who have tremendous clout... clout based on their track records of delivering big, tough projects, which can't be erased.
Having solidified their support among middle management upper management will try again in a year or two.
Might work in other companies. Won't work at Google, not without significant cultural and structural changes. It's really not a normal corporation in many respects.
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It's an evil project. Google does all evil projects. Therefore they will do this. Simple logic.
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Well, Google try really, really, hard to pretend they are not evil, all those positive research projects, which are really just marketing to make them look good. In this case, well, the damage has been Google, Google as evil as fuck and ain't no amount of feel good research projects are going to fix that. So a job poorly done by Google turns out to be a job well done for us. No more bullshitting about the kind of evil at it's core company we are dealing with, a marketing engine that uses social media as bai
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They will try to make Android less reliant on Google Search services. They already had to due to EU competition investigations anyway. If they can make Android work in China with the Play Store and other Google services but without Search, the bit which everyone is upset over censorship of, they can still get all that revenue.
Shutdown = moved to another building (Score:1)
Like Facebook's Building 8.
bullshit (Score:1)
China has a ton of money and desire for a censored search engine; Google has a knowledge of search engine creation, and a desire for money. Google will find a way.
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
Money, uh, finds a way.
major blow to Google executives (Score:1)
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What is your reasoning behind this?
A communist (who believes in a highly regulated economy, where the interests of the community exceeds the interests of the individual) isn't an American Patriot, or agrees on Censoring information. Now me personally I don't see communism as an effective economic model, because we have China lagging behind the US, while in terms of resources and demographics it has the ability to exceed the US quite easily, I expect the communist economic model is holding the country back.
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A communist (who believes in a highly regulated economy, where the interests of the community exceeds the interests of the individual)
Communism is a brutal dictatorship where the state takes everything and leaves you nothing. Not sure what that has to do with your parenthetical.
I expect the communist economic model is holding the country back.
Ya think?
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C'mon, Steve. If you want positive search results, do positive things... [businessinsider.com]
change China, not Google (Score:3)
what part of "don't be evil" did the C-suite forget about?
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Re: change China, not Google (Score:1, Insightful)
It was only a marketing stunt. That's it. That's all it ever was.
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They dropped that a while ago.
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They dropped that a while ago.
Nope. It's still in the Code of Conduct [abc.xyz]. See the final sentence.
Not the end. (Score:4, Informative)
I get the feeling that there is too much "ambition" (greed) in play here to simply walk away. Instead, it seems like they put this on the back burner until people stop paying attention and then start things going again with a smaller team.
Scruples seem to be in short supply among executives and board members when it comes to getting a piece of the China pie.
Google CEO should be fired (Score:3, Interesting)
The CEO should be fired for supporting oppression.
That is all.
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Agreed. The article mentions this was one of his top priorities, not just a side-idea being explored. Clearly he doesn't have the requisite ethical fiber to properly lead the company.
Privacy team will be fired (Score:2)
Effectively ended (Score:2)
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The right way to do this is to disperse the team, have the architects break down their idea into a bunch of pieces, create a spec, and have each on its own being mostly benign. Then they assemble them, file bug reports where the pieces don't match spec, and eventually end up with the final project done with no one the wiser.
They evidently have a core team who absolutely doesn't give a fuck about ethics, they just messed up because there was a turd in the punchbowl.
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Current CEO does not hold Western values (Score:3)
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What are western values any more? Classical liberalism and free speech? Who the hell still believes in that.
For the past 50 years the west operated under neo-liberal values. Trade with very few strings attached was supposed to make all things better (the strings being, don't invade other countries, don't sponsor terrorism and don't be someone Israel and/or Saudi Arabia want to see toppled). Russia and China would become more democratic and liberal as trade ties pulled us closer and all would be well in the
But he did a great job with Damore! (Score:2)
The Damore incident showed Pichai was incompetent as well as arrogant. A dangerous mix.
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Too bad Google has the man in charge that they do. He misrepresented everything to Congress and at the same time had building a Big Brother search engine for China as one of his main goals. Get rid of this guy and bring in someone with a sense of ethics.
Given the nature of Google's founding, I always figured national security interests (FBI, CIA, NSA) were involved from the start.
Why did science fiction's ubiquitous surveillance trope have to be the one to become true in my lifetime?
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[...] enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.
Communism entails a minimal or absent state, because it would supposedly become redundant once all class struggle has disappeared. China instead has a massive and suppressive authoritarian state, mixing capitalist and nationalistic ideas into socialist ones. They're in no way progressing towards communism, but they are hovering close to national socialism.
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China is communist. Your idea of "communism" is imaginary. "Real" means "as it exists in the world". Real communism is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship (which can coexist quite well with corrupt capitalism, as it turns out).
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I partly disagree. There are more labels to the various socialist politics than just communism, just like how e.g. libertarianism and fascism are both very different implementations of capitalism. Communism as originally described was never implemented, except for in name. It's a bit like how North Korea or GDR calling themselves democratic doesn't make them especially democratic, and they shouldn't be held as examples of democracies.
I can totally see your point though. Communism can be placed at opposite e
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China is really communist, is the thing, as was Stalin's regime. That's what communism really looks like in the real world. Really.
Communism killed 160 million people. That's what communism really is. We don't need to hear about "oh, but it could be done better". So, what only 30 million killed next iteration? "Communism" is as forever tainted as little mustaches that fit under a gas mask.
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How this happens... Cynical. (Score:2)
Though a series of 'initiatives' and 'empowerment sessions' and some 'on going improvements' those who had enough clout to actually stop a project important to upper management will find there 'performance' is now very poor @ review time until they leave or are forced to leave , the project Dragonfly will become project Panda and get built in about 3 years, sans the ugly publicity, everyone working on the project will have NDA's properly signed so that if they so much as speak of it , even at internal event
Why is Everyone so Against This (Score:1)
Why is Google super evil for considering doing this? Yes a censored internet sucks, but a smarter search engine would allow the people to China to access at least a little bit more information. In addition taking money out of China's economy also seems like a good thing. The alternative would be: they do nothing, and things stay exactly the same as it is now.
China certainly isn't going to change their mind if Google search didn't come there, so nothing would change. A 0.1% chance of doing good while mak
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That is not how it really works though.
Right now its plainly obvious to everyone that
1) They don't enjoy the information access the rest of the world does
2) They government is responsible
3) Things are better elsewhere
When you give people a 'good enough' alternative there are those who might believe:
1) The have access to most information, what is censored is really just awful stuff they'd have no interest in
2) The government is helping them or at least not hindering
3) Things are probably like this everywher
I wonder (Score:1)
I wonder if they will now do what IBM did during WWII when they helped germany exterminate Jews. They established a company in another country in order to hide their involvement. It will always be about money.
Sure they did (Score:3)
They publicly stopped it, will rename it and swear to secrecy the next group of folks who will be working on it.
No way they will give up that market so easily.
The want to help Communism is strong (Score:2)
Go full Communist in China under a new team.
Just might save it (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, I completely agree with the human-rights angle here. China isn't the worst player on the planet. Not by a long shot. However, they are far from being the best. In the long run, it's better for Google to stay away from supporting Chinese internet. History would NOT judge them kindly for taking part in something that's widely recognized as a pretty oppressive system. Their leadership is seriously blinded by short term profit if they don't see this.
However, I seriously question the possibility of ANY profit from this project, period. Who in their right mind thinks that China would turn internet search over to a non-Chinese company? really? reeeealllllly? Google executives appear to have forgotten that China is only half capitalist. The other half is iron-fisted state-directed economics. Okay, the Chinese government MIGHT be willing to cede some extreme minority of the search market to Google, but only in exchange for complete control, the source code, and every other piece of tech that Google has ever developed. In exchange for about 1% of their search market, I'm sure. What a colossally dumb idea. This is what the Google executives were making a priority? Really?
It's just one more data point showing that top executives are mostly regular or slightly-above-average schmoes who lucked into the position. They aren't geniuses and they don't have any kind of extraordinary ability. They are successful business types who were in the right place at the right time. Nothing more.