Facebook and Google Cancelled Their Attempts to Operate in China in the Same Year ⇥ bbc.com

I would like to make an amendment to an article I published last month comparing the risks of popular U.S. technology companies with concerns previously reserved for those from China. I wrote:

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost leadership by the U.S. in technology. “A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American,” he said. “Today, six of the top ten are Chinese”.

Incidentally, Zuckerberg gave this speech the same year in which his company announced, after five years of hard work and ingratiation, it was no longer pursuing an expansion into China which would necessarily require it to censor users’ posts. It instead decided to mirror the denigration of Chinese internet companies by U.S. lawmakers and lobbied for a TikTok ban. This does not suggest a principled opposition on the grounds of users’ free expression. Rather, it was seen as a good business move to expand into China until it became more financially advantageous to try to get Chinese companies banned stateside.

This is still true. But there is something else, too. The Foreign Affairs article I just linked to also mentions “Project Dragonfly”, Google’s attempt to build a China-friendly version of its search engine. News of this was broken in August 2018 by Ryan Gallagher of the Intercept.

Dragonfly was immediately condemned by Google employees and U.S. lawmakers. Sundar Pichai was hauled in front of members of the U.S. House of Representatives in December. But work continued in March 2019, and it was not until July that Google publicly confirmed it has ceased efforts.

I imagine the backlash would have spooked Facebook executives and could have been a factor in their own China project’s cancellation. But it is notable to me that both were terminated in the same year.