Vice President Mike Pence: Google must stop Project Dragonfly

US vice president Mike Pence wants Google to stop developing Project Dragonfly. On Thursday, Pence suggested that Google should immediately stop censoring the version of its search engine that would be under development for the Chinese market.

That’s what Pence told us during a discussion at the conservative think tank Hudson Institute. The Dragofly app will strengthen the Communist Party’s censorship and endanger the privacy of Chinese customers, says Pence. As far as the Vice-President is concerned, therefore, the project should not be continued.

Project Dragonfly

There have been rumours about Project Dragonfly for some time now. Google is said to be developing it to be able to enter the Chinese market again. The search market there is still open to the company and with more than a billion inhabitants it is a potentially lucrative base to work on.

However, in order to do so, the very strict requirements of the Chinese government with regard to the Internet must be met. Not all search terms and websites are available and companies go far with censorship. For Dragonfly, there would be lists of forbidden search terms, which would always be filtered.

The Dragonfly stories have still not been confirmed by Google, although Chief Privacy Officer Keith Enright acknowledged last month that the company has a project with that name. He couldn’t tell us exactly what was being done within the project. In any case, this is reason for Pence to draw conclusions in advance:

A new consensus around China is emerging, said the Vice-President. According to him, more and more business leaders are thinking twice before jumping aboard the Chinese market, especially if that means they have to transfer their intellectual property or promote Beijing’s oppression.