Google’s top executive denied reports Tuesday that the tech giant plans to introduce a censored search engine in China in the near future, less than a decade after the company left the country over human rights concerns, but did not rule out future plans.
“Right now, we have no plans to launch in China; we don’t have a search product there,” CEO Sundar Pichai told the House Judiciary Committee in answer to a question from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat. “We are committed to being fully transparent, including with policymakers, to the extent we ever develop plans to do that.”
Pichai later defended any tentative expansion plans into China as one that would have a “positive impact” by offering users greater access to information.
“We feel that calling,” he told lawmakers.
News outlets previously reported that Google was preparing to offer a search engine in China in the first part of 2019 that would censor information related to human rights and other issues. The company’s top privacy official in September confirmed the existence of “Project Dragonfly” but said it was not close to launching, comments that Pichai later echoed.
“We wanted to learn what it would look like if Google were in China, so that’s what we built internally,” Pichai told a conference in October hosted by Wired, adding that it was still in the “very early” stages.
The project, which has been “underway for awhile,” has at-times had over 100 engineers working on it, Pichai said. But when asked by Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., in Tuesday’s hearing if the company has held any conversations with Chinese officials on the project, Pichai noted specifically that no discussions have occurred “around launching a search product in China.”
The reported plans have brought bipartisan criticism at a time when Google is under increasing pressure in Washington, D.C., over claims from Republicans that the firm’s signature search engine is biased against conservative voices, a claim Pichai and others have vehemently denied.
Google’s prior search engine in China was shut down in 2010 after the company was hit by a massive cyberattack from within the country, a hack that targeted Chinese human-rights activists.
[Related: Google Plus to shut down earlier after data breach affecting almost 53 million users]
