‘Providing robust data privacy model is important for future of Internet’

I think it has been a momentous moment in the last four years for India, given Covid and the adoption of digital. From my vantage point, I see the growth of digital faster than ever before. I do believe digital adoption will trend towards a billion in two years. So, the momentum is very high.

When I think from the business lens, when I look at the ecosystem of advertising revenues, they are growing and growing fast. And so is subscription. The market is becoming more balanced. There are enough consumers who can afford to pay for subscriptions.

So, what I said about subscriptions earlier was not to do with Google, but for the market in general. We have a modest subscription business, mostly YouTube, but it is still really, really small. If you look at the market, look at all the media and entertainment companies, the number of subs that they have are growing in double-digit. So, that’s a picture for four to five years on. It’s an exciting cycle, in whose context we are thinking of the question of privacy. 

But do we observe privacy to be a roadblock or causing friction to our business? I feel, given our values, we believe these are important things to solve for the future of the Internet. I think the reality is that the Internet is becoming core to everything from education to entertainment to events.. And if you’re not able to keep our users safe from misinformation, financial fraud, and equally provide a robust data privacy model – we will lose the trust of the users.

Specifically, I think, we announced in 2020 that we will spend that money over the next five to seven years. We will continue to invest using that money in the next few years.

There’s no correlation between the environment in India and what we are doing. We look at India much beyond what everybody else is doing. Strategically makes sense, India is a really exciting market to be in for us. And how do we serve as consumers with the best technology that is a question that we keep debating on. I cannot speak specifically on Lava.

We deeply care about consumers as a company. We have been very mindful and careful around how we cater to that. The regulations in India have been very balanced as well. I am leaving CCI for a moment – for enabling innovation, and solving for safety for the consumer. I think we just need to do more from a CCI  perspective, explain ourselves better to the stakeholders so that they understand.  Then, it is all about enabling higher levels of opportunities. 

We have been investing in our research lab in Bangalore, which we have scaled up very significantly over the last few years. We have a portion of cloud business operating from here, a large amount of tech talent is based out of India. Whether it is around UI UX technology capabilities,  or cloud, or search there is high quality talent here, and we are very focused on growing here. But I won’t be able to share any specific numbers. But India continues to be a key focus for Google. 

I think the role that India plays in the world economy will really pave the growth trajectory for Google.  But I think what excites us,  given our current vision, is that we are a company which believes in impacting lives at scale. And I think, for me, the focus on India is much beyond just business. We believe the problem that you’re solving, the idea of enabling consumers everyday is so much deeper and bigger. When we solve for India we solve for the rest of the world.