Google has suspended plans to develop and launch a cloud computing product designed for the Chinese market, among other politically controversial countries.
This is the second initiative within Google to develop a product for the Chinese market, after the existence of Dragonfly was revealed in media reports in 2018 and caused a firestorm of controversy until it was shut down in December 2018.
This new project is referred to by Google as “Isolated Region,” and the intended customer was to be countries intent on controlling the flow of data within their borders.
Google’s statement reads:
“We’ve seen emerging requirements around adoption of cloud technology from customers and regulatory bodies in many different parts of the world. We have a comprehensive approach to addressing these requirements that covers the governance of data, operational practices, and survivability of software. Isolated Region was just one of the paths we explored to address these requirements. What we learned from customer conversations and input from government stakeholders in Europe and elsewhere is that other approaches we were also actively pursuing offered better outcomes. Isolated Region was not shut down over geopolitical concerns or the pandemic. Google does not offer and has not offered cloud platform services inside China, and Google Cloud is not weighing options to offer the Google Cloud Platform in China”.