Sundar Pichai, On Google’s Behalf, Will Face Congress On December 5

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is going to Washington to present himself in front of the House Judiciary Committee, talking about several matters, relating to sexual harassment, the Project Dragonfly plan as well as its bias against conservatives. The hearing will take place on December 5.

As Pichai was absent from a previous hearing for high-profile tech firms in September including Facebook and Twitter executives, which annoyed lawmakers, this would be his first time at a congressional hearing.

Washington has been taking a close look at Google since there are accusations against the tech firm of political bias. Back in August, President Donald Trump posted his allegation against the tech company on Twitter. He said that Google intentionally arranged its search results to suppress voices of Conservatives. Trump also posted a video to support another argument that Google did not promote his State of the Union address but instead promoted Barack Obama’s speeches every January. President Trump tweeted with the #StopTheBias hashtag.

In response, the giant tech firm denied Trump’s allegation, arguing that its page did promote his January address. Additionally, Google clarified that it neither promote Obama’s nor Trump’s addresses during their first years in office as they were not technically State of Union addresses. To back this point, Google showed a screenshot on the Internet Archive, illustrating what displays on the platform.

Besides that, other matters will be brought up, too.

If you haven’t forgotten, Google’s way of dealing with sexual harassment and how it let go of executives related to the misconducts caused 20,000 employees across the globe to walk out.

Google walkout against sexual harassment in early November 2018

Furthermore, the tech giant has been riled by reports on Project Dragonfly plan, in which it intends to create a censored search engine for China after it retreated from here for eight years. When leaving China, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, mentioned Chinese policies as “totalitarianism”.

About this claim, Google said that was only “exploratory”, and it does not mean to actually launch a search engine in China. According to Keith Enright, chief privacy officer at Google, there is something called Project Dragonfly, but he would not go into details.

Meanwhile, Google CEO Pichai is working hard to mend the relationship between his company and the federal government. In September, he visited Washington to attend closed-door meetings with lawmakers, including Republican Kevin McCarthy from California.