Google Could Pay Dearly for Catering to China

Eight years after it exited China over censorship and espionage concerns, Alphabet Inc.’s Google appears ready to compromise with the Chinese government in order to return. Last spring, the company reportedly began work on Dragonfly, a search engine customized for the China market that would block keywords such as “human rights” and provide Chinese authorities a means of tracking whoever is daring enough to attempt such searches. Development work accelerated after a December 2017 meeting between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and top Chinese officials, according to the Intercept.

This strategy of creating two products — one for China and one for the rest of the world — may seem like a pragmatic way to seize a piece of the world’s largest internet market. In reality, the idea that one product can be insulated from the other is naive. All Google would be doing with Dragonfly is making itself more, not less vulnerable to Chinese interference.