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by snotrockets 907 days ago
Google’s executives would very much like to operate in China, only they faced public pressure (the term to search for is “project dragonfly”).

I won’t be surprised if they’ll retry to enter China soon.

2 comments

Public pressure vs $1tn. Hmm.
Right now, part of that pressuring public also includes elected representatives in positions of some power over Google, which is quite the stick.

Of course, such elected are replaced every few years.

So it's not public pressure, it's powerful people who don't like Google.
Those people are beholden to public pressure. That's how representative governments tend to work.
Sure, but the claim was that they faced public pressure. The reality is likely not that millions of people marched to put pressure on Google, nor to ensure their representatives knew what to do in this situation, but that some powerful people (who happen to be elected representatives, maybe) decided that Google should be dissuaded from this path, and that's what happened.
They faced internal pressure from employees as I remember it. They shutdown their Chinese sites after the PLA was caught hacking Gmail accounts in Hong Kong, but this was when Paige and Sergey were more involved (being from formerly authoritarian communist countries).
You didn’t bother to search, so let me paste the relevant content for you here:

> The Dragonfly project was an Internet search engine prototype created by Google that was designed to be compatible with China's state censorship provisions.

> The public learned of Dragonfly's existence in August 2018, when The Intercept leaked an internal memo written by a Google employee about the project.

> […]

> However, according to employees, work on Dragonfly was still continuing as of March 2019, with some 100 people still allocated to it.

> In July 2019, Google announced that work on Dragonfly had been terminated.

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine), literally the first Google search result on that keyword)

None of that conflicts with what I said.
Your comment suggests rank and file had power to shut it down (they didn't: it was the public scrutiny), or that it was shut down in response to happening a decade before it was shut down.
From what I remember the internal pressure was pretty intense, that the story about employees being against it is what the press covered and what caused the public scrutiny. You could claim that employee opinion would have been meaningless without public coverage of that opinion, but that is another argument all together.
> but this was when Paige and Sergey were more involved (being from formerly authoritarian communist countries).

Does this mean S&P would be more receptive to operations in China or less receptive to it?

Less, much less.