Google Abandons Another Shady China Venture

Google is competing fiercely against Amazon and Microsoft to build out a cloud computing offering that can establish itself as a serious competitor to AWS, but two employees have reportedly told Bloomberg that Google has abandoned a cloud computing project in China and other politically-sensitive countries, largely due to concerns over worsening bilateral relations with the US.

The tech behemoth reportedly shut down the project, known internally as "Isolated Region," which sought to address nations’ desires to control data within their borders, the employees said. The decision to close the program was a "massive strategy shift," according to one of the employees, who said hundreds of employees around the world had worked on "Isolated Region".

Given the ominous description, it's not too difficult to understand the true nature of this project: Google would essentially help empower China to enforce its "Great Firewall," which it is now trying to expand to Hong Kong.

A Google spokesperson who commented on the record to Bloomberg insisted that the project was scrapped for reasons that were totally innocuous.

A Google spokeswoman said Isolated Region was shelved because “other approaches we were actively pursuing offered better outcomes.” She declined to detail those approaches. “We have a comprehensive approach to addressing these requirements that covers the governance of data, operational practices and survivability of software,” the spokeswoman said. “Isolated Region was just one of the paths we explored to address these requirements."

“What we learned from customer conversations and input from government shareholders in Europe and elsewhere is that other approaches we were actively pursuing offered better outcomes,” the spokeswoman said. “Google does not offer and has not offered cloud platform services inside China."

According to one of the employees, the plan involved selling cloud services in what Google calls “sovereignty sensitive markets,” such as China and the E.U., where there are strict laws for companies offering services that involve the collection or processing of people’s data.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/google-abandons-shady-china-cloud-project