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Project Dragonfly is Google's project to create a censored search engine in China that follows all government laws, after Google originally pulled out of the country in 2010. Recently, hundreds of Google employees signed onto a letter demanding that Google drop the project, claiming that it would make Google a party to the Chinese government's attempts to oppress its own people and create a precedent where Google would be obliged to help other countries do the same. It hasn't been confirmed that the project will proceed past the testing stage, but the executives have said that the Chinese market is so huge that it doesn't make sense to ignore it, that they can be a force for change and reform by working within the system, and that other big tech companies already work with the Chinese government.

So what say you? Is it necessary for Google or any company to cooperate with the Chinese government for the sake of accessing the market, or should it drop the project in favor of its supposed values?

I mean, I actually kind of agree that the project should be canned.  If China wants to oppress its people, Google shouldn't be actively helping with that.  I agree that it creates a precedent that I wouldn't want to see be taken even more advantage of, and that may even potentially encourage Google to start censoring their search engine here in the US to cave to the current sensitive culture.

And that's the last thing we really need.

You do realize that, while not strictly censored, your search results are already heavily biased?

Personalized search results are also an important concern, but (IMO at least) it's essentially a completely different issue from assisting in direct government censorship.

That said, one argument I've heard in favor of Project Dragonfly is that Baidu is a completely terrible search engine (from both a quality and political/censorship standpoint) and Google, even a censored version, would be better than that.

The Chinese Government is a brutal and horrifying dictatorship. My old Chinese tutor, when she gave birth to her daughter, unfortunately, her daughter did not survive a week and died. My tutor, though, had her tubes tied while she was unconscious and without her permission by the government. The worst aspects of any government we live under, the Chinese government is 50 times worse. Helping that brutal and inhuman coterie of bloodthirsty monsters better suppress and control their people would be a monstrous act in an of itself. Google should cut all ties and cancel that project.

In my opinion, Google cannot claim to cancel United States government AI contracts citing "morality" while continuing to develop a search engine which self censors and would be employed to oppress BILLIONS for a totalitarian regime bent on domination of its neighbours and perhaps others at the same time.  Either you do both and say "screw morality" publicly, or you don't continue either project (assuming you've already done the AI progect cancellation).  Just because the CCP is really good at branding in the United States doesn't make what it does moral or ethical.  It's atrocious and getting really close to actually committing genocide against at least one ethnic minority population.

But Google only cancelled those contracts after employees protested, it was leaked to the press, and the company was publicly shamed. Prior to that Google's reasoning was that someone was going to be working with them anyways, might as well be them.

Personally, I think it's abhorrent that companies are working with regimes to oppress their own Citizens just so they can make a little more money. It's incredibly short-sighted and all the things that everyone here has said it was. After Google's first debacle in China, which ended when Google discovered that Chinese government agents were able to gain access to their source code and monitor dissidents using Gmail, it's shocking that they would want to deal with that again.

But what really concerns me is the shift in company culture at Google. I've read much about Google's culture in the past, and while it may have been lampooned in public, "Don't Be Evil" carried a lot of weight in Google's culture. It allowed employees to question and force a re-examination of projects that may have made Google a lot of money but were questionable and it helped to create an extremely innovative company. There was the idea that if you focused on making great products that the users and money would come along. But in the last few years as the founders have stepped back it seems to have become a more generic big tech company whose driving interest is making money. Employees seem to be routinely disregarded until the whole thing is leaked to the press (maybe it's being leaked because they are disregarded), and Google seems to have to be publicly shamed to get it to reconsider its decisions. At the same time, I can't remember the last time Google really successfully innovated anything...maybe Android or Chrome?