Washington D.C. – House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) joined The Story with Martha MacCallum to discuss Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
Excerpts of the interview are below, or watch online here.
“The first thing you have to understand is how powerful Google is. The Wall Street Journal says 90% of all searches on the internet go through Google. Think about that power, if you end up the amount of information you are gathered, the power of what they have you see, two-thirds of all adults get their information from the internet and Google also owns YouTube. So the thing that concerned me the most, of course it was privacy, of course it was political bias but what really concerned me was the dealings with China, this Dragonfly. Remember in 2010, I gave Google a lot of credit, they pulled out of China because they said they didn’t want to censure individuals in there, see what they are doing on the internet. But now they talk about doing Dragonfly. He said they weren’t working with the Chinese government but they had 100 engineers working on a long-term project. To have 100 engineers working on a project such as that, concerns me about what’s going forward and Sundar did not rule out of one day reentering China. And remember, when Google was created, their motto was ‘Do No Harm.’ They took that away a year or so ago, I wonder why.”
“This administration has some real some concerns about some of the technology that China is doing. Remember, about Tencent and others. Those technology companies are real concerning to me. My true belief is a free world needs a free and open internet. So what does Google want to be? Do they want to be part of the free world? The things that China do about reeducating people that they disagree with – their religions, monitoring individuals. I mean remember what China recently came out with, that they’re going to score individuals inside the actions of their own government about whether they could even get on the bus or not. That’s a real concern to me about moving forward and I don’t think Google would want to be a part of that.”