After facing serious criticism from consumers, employees and experts alike, Google has decided to stay away from the Pentagon cloud computing data contract. If gone through, the contract should have given a revenue of $10 Billion to the company. While Google is not the only market leader that has submitted a bid to JEDI — Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure cloud —, the Mountain View-giant faced most amount of criticism from users. It was also partly due to the involvement of the company in another project with the department of defence. Now, however, Google has found some serious reasons why it is backing down.
“While we are working to support the US government with our cloud in many areas, we are not bidding on the Jedi contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI principles, and second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications,” said a Google spokesperson, reports BBC. In short, Google believes that it cannot comply with the cloud computing and data ethics restrictions it has posed if the JEDI contract it successful. The current AI principles would also put Google under scrutiny when it comes to handling sensitive data.
As far as the contract goes, it would have helped Google to gain some serious presence in the cloud business, which is now being headed by Microsoft and Amazon. Sources also add that Amazon Web Services is likely to win the contract from the Pentagon, especially now that Google has backed down from the project. This decision was rather necessary for the company, considering that Google+ data security was found to be at greater risk on this Monday. Although Google has not commented on this issue, it says the exploit has not been used so far.
