Eli Lake, Columnist

Google’s China Problem Is America’s China Problem

The controversy over the company’s ‘Dragonfly’ project is about much more than search results.

December 10, 2018 at 1:02 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Two powerful forces.
Photographer: SOPA Images/LightRocket

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When employees first learned of the Google project known as Dragonfly, there was an internal uprising.

It is easy to see why. The project, a search engine for China, would not only help a totalitarian regime censor the web, it could also track Internet users. Thousands of Googlers, as they are known, eventually went public with their opposition, signing an open letter in protest of the project. Is it any surprise that a company that canceled a contract with the Pentagon to sort through drone video images would be queasy about helping the Chinese Communist Party consolidate control over its people?