Google's Dragonfly Wades into Murky Water

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai had to come before Congress yesterday to answer a series of questions about bias on their search engine along with their plans to buildout a search engine that was compliant with Chinese censorship laws.

Google first rolled out their Google.cn platform in China in 2006, eventually leaving the market in 2010 due to concerns over censorship laws. The CEO at the time Sergey Brin was concerned about how Google's compliance in China infringed on civil liberties. The Intercept released a story over the summer citing a new search engine called Dragonfly, which Google was testing and building out in secret to re-enter the Chinese market. This search engine would be able to censor information making it compliant with Chinese law.

When the story broke, it was reported that around 1,400 Google employees signed a petition against Dragonfly. Around 700 employees went public with their disagreement with the Dragonfly project. About 500 signatures were gathered in support of the Dragonfly project according to reporting on the issue.

In China there are around 772 million internet users, who mostly use search engine Baidu. Freedom House gave China a rating of 88 for freedom of the net, one of the worst internet freedom scores.