Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai on Thursday told employees at a meeting that plans to re-enter China with a search engine are “exploratory” and in the “early stages,” addressing a topic that has exploded with controversy.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin also spoke to the staff at the company’s all-hands meeting, saying that Google is not compromising its principles.
The accounts came from two people familiar with the discussion at the meeting of the Alphabet Inc unit. They asked not to be identified as they were talking about private matters.
Google did not respond to requests for comment.
The discussion at the meeting was the first time Google executives addressed the company’s plans for a possible return to China.
“We are not close to launching a search product in China, and whether we would do so or could so is all very unclear,” Pichai said in a transcript of the meeting.
Reports surfaced two weeks ago that Google was developing a project, called Dragonfly, to launch a mobile search app that would censor results in compliance with Chinese government rules.
Google pulled its servers from China in 2010 over concerns about government censorship, a decision Brin primarily drove.
Google’s cloud division is also in talks with multiple Chinese companies about partnerships in the country as the Internet search giant seeks ways to get back into the world’s second-biggest economy, Bloomberg News has reported.
The first two questions from staff members at Google’s meeting were about Dragonfly, the people said.
After those discussions, a company official suggested changing the topic because the executives’ comments were already being leaked online, one of the people said.
“Our stated mission is to organize the world’s information,” Pichai said, according to the transcript. “China is one-fifth of the world’s population. I think if we were to do our mission well, I think we have to think seriously about how we do more in China.”
More than 1,000 Google employees signed an internal petition that said the Dragonfly project raised “urgent moral and ethical issues,” a copy of the document showed.
The signatories also wrote that the project was “made in secret,” and asked for management to set up oversight processes for the initiative.
“Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically informed decisions about our work, our projects and our employment,” employees wrote.
The tech giant had already come under fire this year from thousands of employees who signed a petition against a US$10 million contract with the US military, which was not renewed.
With the secret project, Google employees are reportedly worried that they might unknowingly be working on technology that could help China hide information from its people.
“I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world and I don’t see any reason why that would be different in China,” Pichai said. “We’ll definitely be transparent as we get closer to actually having a plan of record here. We definitely do plan to engage more and talk more.”
Additional reporting by AFP
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