Google has abandoned plans to develop and launch a cloud computing product designed for the Chinese market, among different politically polemic countries, per a report from Bloomberg. The move marks the second high-profile initiative at intervals Google to develop a product for the Chinese market, when the existence of an expurgated Chinese search product, codenamed “Dragonfly,” was disclosed in media reports in 2018 and caused a firestorm of conflict till Google reportedly shut it down in Gregorian calendar month of that year
This new project is referred to internally as “Isolated Region,” and the intended customer was to be countries intent on controlling the flow of data within their borders, Bloomberg reports. The goal was to separate this product from Google’s central cloud computing systems and network infrastructure, so as to allow governments or third-party companies to oversee the data moving through without fear it would put the privacy of other Google business customers and individual users in other countries at risk.