New York: Google, which quit China in 2010 in protest over Beijing’s strict censorship policies, is not relaunching its services in the country without the ‘right conditions’,” CEO Sundar Pichai has said.
Google faced outrage last year when it was reported that the company may have been looking to get back into the search engine business in China, the world’s second largest economy.
In an interview to CNN, the 46-year-old Indian-origin CEO of Google said the company was not actively working on a new Chinese search engine, though he acknowledged that Google was ignoring China and its hundreds of millions of internet users.
“There are no plans for us to consider relaunching our service in China,” Pichai said.
Pichai said that Google would need the ‘right conditions’ to relaunch in the country since censorship-free internet or open internet is an ‘important condition’ for making that decision. But he declined to share further details, the report said.
“I don’t want to speculate on a hypothetical situation. We have no plans. And, you know, we are not spending time on it,” Pichai said.
When asked to respond to US General Joseph Dunford’s claim that Google’s work in China ‘is a direct benefit’ to the nation’s military, Pichai said, “We are not doing any work in China. We have a limited presence in China. That includes ‘limited AI’, or artificial intelligence, work through an open-source project called TensorFlow.
China has long been a conundrum for tech companies, which are drawn to its massive user base and thriving online shopping market. But human rights abuses and tightening authority by the ruling Communist Party of China over free speech and information has forced companies to grapple with ethical questions, the CNN report said.
PTI
