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In perhaps the clearest confirmation to date, Google’s Vice President of Public Policy, Karan Bhatia, told a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that the company has terminated Project Dragonfly, a search engine effort for the Chinese market. Project Dragonfly caused a lot of controversy among Google’s employees with many signing a letter for the project to be ended.
At the committee hearing, Bhatia responded “We have terminated Project Dragonfly” when quizzed by the Republican, Senator Josh Hawley. Following a comment last year from Google bosses that there were no plans to launch Dragonfly, concerned Google employees found that development was still on-going as of March, according to a report by The Intercept.
When reporters reached out to Google following Bhatia’s comments, a spokesperson pointed to an earlier statement issued by the company in March where it said:
“As we’ve said for many months, we have no plans to launch Search in China and there is no work being undertaken on such a project. Team members have moved to new projects.”
It’ll certainly be interesting to see what happens regarding Dragonfly in future. Many of the statements issued by Google make it sound like the project has just been put on ice but that it could resume in future. As for the most recent comments over Dragonfly’s termination, only time will tell if this is really the case.
Source: BuzzFeed News