Project Shield is an anti-distributed-denial-of-service (anti-DDoS) that is offered by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google, to websites that have "media, elections, and human rights related content.
"[1] The main goal of the project is to serve "small, under-resourced news sites that are vulnerable to the web's growing epidemic of DDOS attacks", according to team lead George Conard.
[2] Google initially announced Project Shield at their Ideas Conference on October 21, 2013.
[1] The service was initially only offered to trusted testers, but on February 25, 2016, Google opened up the service to any qualifying website a Google-owned reverse proxy that identifies and filters malicious traffic.
[4][5] In January 2019, Google's Jigsaw expanded Project Shield to offer free DDoS protection to political organizations and websites in Europe, ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections.